"When the switch trips and I convert to nothing...";

What is it with poets when they turn sixty? Tom Wayman of Winlaw investigates what lasts and what doesn't, body pain, fate, death, burial, eternity, existence and aging all in the book's first section titled "60.";

"I will spend a very long time/ in the dark/ without a face/ or word. / Only the light /knows my name.";

These poems, many already published in an impressive list of journals, are plain spoken accounts of rural living and especially about the earth. Wayman revisits the same scene: mountain, aspens, creek, house, repeatedly but the repetition is not dulling, rather it is a deepening experience of awe and affection. His loving attention to the landscape of SE BC, where he lives, through the cycles of seasons, weathers and personal moods, is the strength of the book. Never obscure, he is so plain-spoken however that he risks verging on the prosaic. Is this poetry or chopped-up prose?

Wayman has developed a reputation as a 'work' poet who writes about labour but he hardly touches on his job as a teacher at the University of Calgary except in irony or distaste. His real work is the words about snow and wind and silence and recollections of his life as a labourer and, (did I mention it?) aging.

The last section in Shoaling Water is about poem-making. "The Garden,"; in which older and young poets garden together but not all in harmony, is required reading for all poets manqué. The section ends with a lullaby, "Sleep poems/ yet unformed.../ You and your burden/ shall not vanish/ nor lose your powers/ You remain forever the beginning/ of the story, / the word drowsing in the stone.";

978-1-55017-401-4

-- review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp

[BCBW 2007] "Poetry"