Boundary Country.

Description

276 pages
$18.95
ISBN 978-1-897235-25-6
DDC C813'.54

Author

Publisher

Year

2007

Contributor

Reviewed by Matt Hartman

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Review

While poetry has been Wayman’s most frequent medium of expression, he has also been writing short fiction and publishing in literary magazines. Collected here for the first time, these dozen stories display an astonishing range of subject, points of view, and characterization. Wayman has always been able to put himself squarely in the minds of the people of whom he writes. His poems about working men and women have earned him resounding credit in academia (he has taught at various institutions across the country) and in bookstore sales. He is well-known for his editing of East of Main: an Anthology of Poems from East Vancouver (1989) and other collections.

 

The stories in Boundary Country, Wayman says in an introduction, “reflect my interest in the places and moments we encounter a boundary … I consider important where history becomes memory, a goal stiffens into an expectation, desire transforms to belief, and the ghosts of rejected possibilities haunt the choices we have made or that have been imposed upon us.” In the opening story—the title story—the narrator picks up a hitchhiker (“an old fellow standing by the road, thumb out, in the middle of nowhere”) while on a trip to the Kootenay region of British Columbia. In the space of a few pages Wayman presents the reader with stark details about Doukhobors, religion, rage, and murder. Wayman is as comfortable writing in the third person. In “The Ring,” he presents a three-sided relationship—a couple and a former lover still lusting after the woman—while in “Body Lotions” he returns to first person narrative, this time in the voice of a young woman with relationship problems.

 

Some of the most involving stories in the collection deal with Jewish backgrounds and the Eastern Europe of World War II. In “The Dean of the Distillery” a young boy remembers his family’s disappearances into the horrors of the Holocaust, and in “The Murder” the mystery of the killing of three of the narrator’s relatives in a “shtetl in Byelorussia where my father’s people came from, a little distance northeast up the Dvina from Vitebsk” combines stark reminders of that terrible period with the realism characteristic of the author’s style. Boundary Country is highly recommended.

Citation

Wayman, Tom., “Boundary Country.,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed November 9, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/27754.