Out of the Ordinary: New Poems

Wayman crafts poetry that captures how the everyday can contain the extraordinary.

The twenty-first 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 can both arise from, and affect, 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 this collection investigate some responses to this century’s quandaries, the enduring mysteriousness of nature as well as of our historic and cultural worlds, and what we find if we imaginatively enter a carrot seed or a raindrop. Other sections 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, and he indeed demonstrates how poetry can make the ordinary shine brightly even in these turbulent decades.