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WINNER OF THE 2009 LAMPMAN-SCOTT AWARD
Lucid accurate detail and music at every turn.
Many of the poems in Noble Gas, Penny Black explore the subject of departure and arrival, an ongoing theme in David O'Meara's work. Travel—being between places, in stations and airports and unfamiliar cities—creates a psychological, emotional space rife with reassessment, where the individual dwells simultaneously in the future and in the past. At the same time, O'Meara imbues the domestic with a similar compelling transience, in poems on love and current events, where "History's narrowed eye" roams over landscapes "felt / but never held, like wind over water." O'Meara gives us lucid, accurate detail and music at every turn, and is entangled enough with the world to make us ache:
"Through the candid gloom of the bar I watch you
mourning there among the faces, a hall of mirrors
lit with stories and clumsy stabs
at humour
we hope will frame and explain a life. I hold
myself in a cool remove, stubborn over beers.
Wanting, times like this, to be like you.
In tears."
—from "After the Funeral"
"Good poets have a thing, a sleight-of-hand which shows itself like this: an image appears in a stanza that's been doing its job just fine, thanks very much, and then with no fanfare something quietly blooms before your reading eye, it blooms or flowers and spreads itself back into the lines behind it and over the lines that are still to come, and the poem moves from its previous mode into the kind of place which good poets intuit must be reachable but nevertheless often miss out on, just don't get the syllables right...[There are] lines from Noble Gas, Penny Black, where the syllables are, let me incautiously say, near-perfect"—Don Coles
"A muffled world of heaviness shot through with yearning and great attention to detail...a poet that I'll gladly read, not just for his skill with the line, with syllables, and with that sleight imagistic hand, but for the big-heartedness of the work, and how he lays that heart over very real things, lovingly and precisely rendered."—Sina Queyras
"Noble Gas, Penny Black belongs in the small cluster of great poetry being produced in Canada these days. It's formally challenging. It's confident in its style. It's 'the commonplace' in praxis. And it's a defense of love and togetherness."—Alessandro Porco
"O'Meara's technique is generally subtle and understated—reminding me of the best work of Don Coles—serving, rather than submerging, the poems' subjects...His skill, insight, and discipline make the collection richer with each re-reading."—Zachariah Wells
, Canadian Notes & QueriesBorn and raised in Pembroke, Ontario, David O'Meara now lives in Ottawa and tends bar at the Manx Pub. Storm still (1999) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. The Vicinity (2003) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Noble Gas, Penny Black is his third collection.