Tom Wayman, Songs Without Price
I've got a more complicated relationship with Tom Wayman's writing than with any other writer's, but mostly for personal reasons that almost certainly won't matter for any other reader, so consider yourself forewarned. To some extent, Wayman's editorship of Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job is what helped me persist through first-year university English. I collected most of his books of poetry during my undergrad ( Money and Rain: Tom Wayman Live! ), and I appreciated their deliberate clarity, their secret handshakes for readers who'd grown up working-class, their humour, their poignancy. On the other hand, well, sometimes they thudded rather than sang, the jokes felt staged rather than real, and at times I felt taken for granted as a reader. These things happen, and when was a poetry collection ever perfectly consistent or accomplished etc, but I still felt disloyal for feeling that way. When I read his novel Woodstock Rising , which I very much didn...
