This guy is the real deal, and more Canadians should be reading his books.
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The Road to Appledore
Tom Wayman | Harbour Publishing
$26.95 | 298pp.
How Can You Live Here: Poems by Tom Wayman
Tom Wayman | Frontenac House Poetry
$19.95 | 98pp.
B.C- based poet, novelist and essayist Tom Wayman is an underappreciated national treasure. If there were any doubt about the important contribution Wayman has made to our national literature, his 2024 doubleheader, a collection of poetry and a memoir of life in the Slocan Valley, settles the issue. This guy is the real deal, and more Canadians should be reading his books.
The memoir, the wonderfully subtitled The Road to Appledore: or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place, records and reflects upon Wayman’s long sojourn in the Slocan Valley on the property he calls Appledore. He is wry about his adventures and misadventures as he works to improve the property and the house he lives in, while fretting over what to do about a problematic relationship and how to put together a life as a freelance writer and teacher long before remote work became fashionable. He has grasped the core wisdom that life is essentially comic, and that he is often the punchline to the cosmic joke. This gives the memoir a wonderful tone of wry, mature wisdom, which goes well with the lyrical gifts that flow from his life as a poet.
“…the losers, the creepy, the underground/outlaws because nobody well adjusted, “normal”/in the judgment of a toxic/social environment is likely to strive toward/ a fairer, more egalitarian/economic and political arrangement.”
Wayman’s new collection of poems, How Can You Live Here? is a lovely companion piece to the memoir. It presents the poet listening to what one section of the book calls Terrain Music, perhaps most beautifully in the poem Hum, which opens: “Daffodils whistle their yellow tunes/in small ensembles, along the edges of the greening grass/ as tulips sing backup at stalk’s ends,/voices muted by their leaves” and closes with the comforting lines “the latest adaption of/the ancient score, anthem/ of bereavement/ and resurgence.”
Highly recommended.