Did I Miss Anything?: Selected Poems, 1973-1993

Lalage Grauer teaches English at Okanagan University College in Kelowna,
B.C.

The author claims that this selection of poetry represents “the best
... to date.” It covers 20 years of his writing, and also includes
three new poems, among them the title poem, “Did I Miss Anything?”
This sharply satirical, yet profound meditation on that most common and
irritating of student questions should be massively reproduced and read
to every class. The poem’s subject—students and teaching—is linked
to the author’s main preoccupation: work and the workplace. The
haunting, harsh working world of “Days: Construction” (1973) is
echoed and amplified 10 years later in the ambitious “Asphalt Hours,
Asphalt Air.”

Wayman contrasts his own “adult” poetry—adult because it faces up
to and includes the world of work (as he sees it)—to writing that
creates an “adolescent dream” of “an imaginary world.” This
facile dichotomy seems to be adolescent, partly because of the moral
high ground that it assumes for the author, and also because of its
blind dismissal of a multiplicity of poets and languages, conventions,
and forms. Reading through this selection, which reveals little change
or development in the poet’s writing in the last 20 years, I keep
getting the feeling that Tom Wayman is holding his own imagination on a
leash, and that something is missing.