"The first group of poems consists of powerful, elegiac praise and mourning on the deaths of his mother and father. These poems are especially moving, due to Wayman's quick eye and ear for seemingly mundane details that become all-important, and, in ironic contrast, render an earthly spirituality to these devastating events... With the wonderfully elegiac yet totally imaginary 'A Meeting with Neruda in Toronto', Wayman restores our faith as readers in the power of words to transcend death, particularly the words of great poets, and Wayman just might be on the way to becoming one of them."
- Event

"For decades, Wayman has played the role of poet-engagé, using his poetic platform to vocalize against the technocratic, bureaucratic and exploitative forces of capitalist society that debase human dignity....He accepts his father's imaginary 'cup of nothing' and fills it with the shimmering, liquid vibrancy of language."
- Montreal Gazette

"Tom Wayman's My Father's Cup evokes the intensity of the personal through a record of his father's dying: the poems come cumulatively to terms with the fact that one person's presence affects others, and that mortality alters one's perception of a place in the world." -W.H. New, Canadian Literature

"Formally sophisticated yet wearing their learning humbly, these poems retrieve and preserve words and gestures from the flux of time, perhaps nowhere more hauntingly than in Wayman's elegy for Al Purdy, elder statesman and uneasy kindred spirit."
- University of Toronto Quarterly

"Wayman's strength, and it is great, lies in his ability to strip away the sheath blocking our understanding of common experience....He doesn't overreach. He knows what detail to add and when to allow the story to tell itself. In this simplicity he is a Canadian Neruda."
- Prairie Fire