My Father's Cup

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

In My Father’s Cup, Tom Wayman gives his readers the wonderful wit and
satire they have come to know. At the same time, he offers something
new—deeply felt elegies for his parents that set the tone for the
whole book. In “Absence,” Wayman says, “I do not want my parents
to be lost.” To make sure they aren’t lost, he does the only thing
he can do: he re-creates them in his poems. In addition to loving
memories of a better past, he evokes the pain of their aging and dying.

There is also a fine elegy for Al Purdy, some cleanly wrought poems on
the natural world and how human “enterprise” is taking it down,
poems about work and how it is being made less and less worthy, a few
poems about friendship, and some of Wayman’s trademark comedies of
human misjudgment. He can still make the reader laugh out loud, as he
does in the ribald, nasty, and delightful “Epithalamium for a Former
Lover” (a curse no one would ever want to receive).

My Father’s Cup is a fine addition to Tom Wayman’s impressive
oeuvre.