Wayman crafts poetry that captures how everyday moments offer a new perspective on global issues. The 21st Century so far feels extraordinary, offering in its first quarter a global pandemic, catastrophic climate events, an unprecedented gap between the super-rich and the rest of us, new shortages in medical services and affordable homes, and more. The poems of Tom Wayman's new collection, Out of the Ordinary, explore how such extraordinary developments arise in the midst of, and in turn impact, the ordinary objects, environments and human relationships that surround us. To probe this traffic between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the poems of Out of the Ordinary go deep, drawing on poetry's almost-magical ability to discover links between aspects of our lives that otherwise seem far apart. The sections of Out of the Ordinary investigate some responses to this century's quandaries, the enduring mysteriousness of the natural, historic and cultural worlds we exist amid, and what we find if we imaginatively enter a carrot seed or a raindrop. Other sections of Out of the Ordinary honour a friend lost during the pandemic, struggle with how to deal with such life-altering transitions, and marvel at the strangeness of this century's literary milieu. "Poets are the janitors of the human heart," Wayman maintains in a poem of that name. In Out of the Ordinary he indeed demonstrates how poetry can make the ordinary shine even in these turbulent decades.
Out of the Ordinary : New Poems