Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 15
- Grade: 10
Description
Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war.
The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality of life by, among other means, the conflict's relentless absorption of public funds in pursuit of dubious ends.
Wayman is also concerned with echoes of the Afghan War in the personal sphere, particularly the war's effect on the natural world in the mountain valleys of southeastern BC where the author makes his home.
Dirty Snow reveals how life in wartime taints our perception of the landscape, and how the natural cycles provide solace despite the moral and economic quagmires in which the inhabitants of the twenty-first century are attempting to conduct their lives.
From the drone of bagpipes on Kandahar Airfield to jet bombers dropping Canadian schools and hospitals on far-flung Afghan villages, Wayman is a master of potent imagery, approaching his subject with a voice that is passionate and dark, all interwoven with prose introductions, allowing readers the sense that they are present at one of Wayman's engaging public readings.
About the author
Awards
- Winner, Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry
Excerpt: Dirty Snow (by (author) Tom Wayman)
AIR SUPPORT
A dropped school falls through air,
turning slowly as debris
pours from windows: a contrail of papers and books
streams upwards thousands of metres
alongside computers, chairs, desks that tumble amid
woodworking equipment, lockers, maps,
basketballs, stage curtains
all aimed
toward tiny huts far below--a brushy hillside's
cluster of subsistence farms
reportedly harboring armed men: fenced yards
with a few chickens, one cow, an ancient horse eyeing
six rows of parched vegetables.
Above the school
while it descends,
another follows, and beyond that, nearly invisible,
a third floats as the fighter-bomber arcs
away, and a second jet drones into position.
The pilot of the first, now on the mission's homeward leg,
reaches down in his cockpit
toward a thermos of hot coffee.
On the ground, hospitals released
in the initial attack wave
erupt sequentially into plumes of fire and dust
as the buildings land: operating tables,
obstetric wards, wheelchairs shatter into shrapnel,
the jagged particles racing outward amid the roiling smoke
to slice through mud walls, animal flesh, stone fences,
human lives that cling to the shaking
shuddering earth
while they clutch forty-year-old rifles
or axes, or the hand of a two-year-old
below the flash of wing
very distant
in the blue-and-white sky.
Librarian Reviews
Dirty Snow
This 17th book of poetry by Wayman is divided into three sections that consider the poet’s views in a conversational style. A commentary introduces the poem with background and perspective. The first section looks unflinchingly at the direct and indirect impact of Canadian involvement in the war in Afghanistan on the people and landscape of Canada. Wayman believes the resources and lives committed not only hurt those directly involved in the conflict but also wound each of us and our communities. The second section, My Wounds, a series of compact moving elegies, considers how we never really heal from the deaths in our own lives. The last section looks at the poet’s home, work, life and a hero of his, the folksinger and activist Utah Phillips.Wayman was shortlisted for the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award and received the AJM Smith Award for a noteworthy volume by a Canadian poet.
Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. BC Books for BC Schools. 2012-2013.
Other titles by
The Road to Appledore
Or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place
How Can You Live Here?
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back
Poems for a Dark Time
If You're Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free
Literature and Social Change
Helpless Angels
a book of music
The Shadows We Mistake for Love
Stories
The Order in Which We Do Things
The Poetry of Tom Wayman
Winter's Skin
Woodstock Rising
