In A Vain Thing, Tom Wayman offers four genre-crossing novellas that explore how vanity influences our most intimate moments no less than our deepest-held social and political beliefs and actions.

A Vain Thing

Literature & Fiction

Wayman, Tom

Contemporary

Turnstone Pr

In an era in which North American poetry has become increasingly the poetry of private experience and experiment, it is stunning to realize that we have among us a poet of tremendous public power and importance. This extensive sample of the narrative and lyrical work of one of Canada’s foremost poets is filled with passionate regard for the threatened beauty of the natural world, the lives of ordinary beings of every species and character, and for the love that is our best hope for peace.

Built to Take It: Selected Poems, 1996-2013 (Northwest Masters)

Poetry

Lynx House Press

A Book of Changes...  The Astonishing Weight of the Dead is Tom Wayman's long-awaited response to life in transition. With stunning clarity, this award-winning poet reveals the emotional rewards and costs of a mid-life self-assessment that prompts transformation. He examines major shifts in his own life, from the urban rush to rural peace, and from external to internal concerns.

The astonishing weight of the dead

Polestar Book Publishers

It's late 1969 and Communist China has successfully launched its first satellite. Inspired by this feat, a group of college students in Laguna Beach, California, set out to put their own satellite into orbit in homage to the recent Woodstock Festival. A young Canadian graduate student at the University of California finds himself at the centre of the mayhem when he and his friends break into a mothballed missile silo and commandeer everything they need, including a nuclear warhead, to blast the Woodstock Nation into the space age. The activists have big plans for their loot, schemes that may well culminate in the Light Show to End All Light Shows in the Nevada desert. An extraordinary black comedy shot full of the social and political issues of the time, Woodstock Rising is a coming-of-age tale couched in free love, rock anthems, and revolution as well as a chronicle of an era whose causes continue to speak to us.

Woodstock Rising

Literary

Dundurn Press

Tom Wayman has earned an international reputation as a work poet, anthologist and essayist. This new collection of 64 poems deals with blue-collar working conditions, labour strikes and unemployment, the hierarchy of business and its philosophy of "money above all considerations" in the workplace. Some new travel poems and a few well-chosen comments on the uses and misuses of language are included, as well as a section consisting of 'found poems' from the Vancouver telephone book.

In a Small House on the Outskirts of Heaven

Harbour Publishing

Tom Wayman has been writing and publishing the poetry of everyday life for over twenty years. This anniversary collection gathers the best of Wayman's published work from eleven previous volumes, along with some provocative new poems, in celebration of his commitment to honest, accessible writing with a sense of humour. Although Wayman laments the disappearance of poetry as a popular art form, and its adoption as "an instument of torture" in educational institutions, "like a steadily-promoted deck officer on the Titanic" he has been having a darn good time as a writer. For years he has been considered the guru of the work poetry movement, and has held a number of blue-collar and white-collar jobs across Canada and the USA.

Did I Miss Anything?: Selected Poems 1973-1993

In this new collection, Canadian poet Tom Wayman, long honoured for his incisive observations on life in the workplace and the classroom, takes a more personal turn. Many of these poems celebrate the gains and losses of "middle-aging," while others reflect on the deaths of parents and friends. Readers of "Life with Dick" and "The Big O" will be relieved to find that, through it all, one quality of Wayman's writing that keeps gaining in vigour is his fine subversive sense of humour.Considered the guru of the North American work poetry movement, Wayman adds depth to the tradition in his latest work by writing white-collar workers alongside blue-collar workers, drawing on his experiences in both worlds.

The Colours of the Forest

For almost thirty years, poet Tom Wayman has celebrated the language of everyday life and work. Praised for his wit, sensuality and conversational style, Wayman can weave the mundane with the mysterious and shed new light on both.In his latest collection, My Father's Cup, Wayman examines the conflicting emotions that arise when a parent dies, when faith withers, when awareness of one's own mortality grows. But this book is as light as it is serious, and Wayman's fans will be pleased to see that the "guru of the work poetry movement" continues to dissect aspects of our work-obsessed culture with insight and humour. As a careful observer of people, nature and relationships, Wayman has a seemingly effortless ability to take his readers scrambling up steep mountains, through union negotiations, to funerals and into lovers' bedrooms.  He also has a rare gift for weaving science and philosophy into engaging poems, sharing epiphanies while posing intriguing questions.

My Father's Cup

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for PoetryHigh Speed Through Shoaling Water incorporates the beauty of the rural landscape with the strangeness of living in today's world. These deceptively simple poems cover rural life, social issues, love's vicissitudes, aging and the writing life. Throughout the book,Wayman interweaves reflections on the landscape of world and work with musings on personal and communal history.High Speed Through Shoaling Water is both celebratory and elegiac, personal and political--recording the passage of time, the events that mark the years and the biological force that bears all living things forward, whether they want to travel that way or not.

High Speed Through Shoaling Water

Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war. The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality of life by, among other means, the conflict's relentless absorption of public funds in pursuit of dubious ends. 
Wayman is also concerned with echoes of the Afghan War in the personal sphere, particularly the war's effect on the natural world in the mountain valleys of southeastern BC where the author makes his home. 
Dirty Snow reveals how life in wartime taints our perception of the landscape, and how the natural cycles provide solace despite the moral and economic quagmires in which the inhabitants of the twenty-first century are attempting to conduct their lives. 
From the drone of bagpipes on Kandahar Airfield to jet bombers dropping Canadian schools and hospitals on far-flung Afghan villages, Wayman is a master of potent imagery, approaching his subject with a voice that is passionate and dark, all interwoven with prose introductions, allowing readers the sense that they are present at one of Wayman's engaging public readings.

Dirty Snow

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Books by Wayman, Tom