David O'Meara

David O'Meara (born Pembroke, Ontario) is a Canadian poet.

Life

He was raised in Pembroke, Ontario. He lives in Sandy Hill, Ottawa, where he tends bar at The Manx Pub.

O'Meara was a judge for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Awards

• Gerald Lampert Award, for Storm Still
• 2004 Lampman-Scott Award, for The Vicinity

Works

Poetry

• "Traffic"; "Rain", Drunken Boat, Spring 2001
• Storm Still. McGill-Queen's University Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-88629-360-4.
• The Vicinity. Brick Books. 2003. ISBN 978-1-894078-30-6.
• Noble Gas, Penny Black. Brick Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1-894078-68-9.
• A Pretty Sight. Coach House Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1-552452-81-3.

Plays

• DISASTER^[1][2]

Music

• "Sing Song", a collaboration with the Ottawa-based group "the HILOTRONS", based on his poetry collection, A Pretty Sight.

Criticism

• "Dangerous Words: Don Domanski and Metaphor". Northern Poetry Revioew.

His poem "Field Crossing" , which appeared in the collection Storm Still, has been set to music by Ottawa-born composer C. Scott Tresham. The work, entitled "Field-Crossing:A Pastoral Cantata for Unaccompanied Chorus, was commissioned by the Ottawa Choral Society, and premiered by the choir in 2003, under the direction of conductor Iwan Edwards.

Reviews

With the publication of The Vicinity in 2003, David O’Meara established himself as one of the best contemporary poets in Canada. As proof of O’Meara’s skill, consider his “Riding the Escalators” (from The Vicinity), which is the apotheosis of formal dexterity synchronized with inquiry into the very possibility of inquiry in a “post-post-modern” age^[3]

The owner of a well-thumbed Baedeker, David O’Meara is constantly drawn to what he called in his first book, Storm Still (1999), the “flawlessly foreign.” Wales, Japan, Italy, and Tunisia are some of the far-flung places his poems have described. O’Meara, however, isn’t interested in package excursions. He prizes, and convincingly registers, alien encounters, situations where “our normal props of distraction,” as he explained in an interview with Ottawater, “have been disturbed.”^[4]

There are several divides in Anglo-Canadian poetry, and one of them is between poets who favour a plain approach and those who prefer to be more rambunctious in diction and tone. O’Meara belongs to the first category. Where other poets go for fireworks, he goes for single matches struck against the dark.^[5]

References

1. http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=14895
2. http://web.archive.org/web/20091027034707/http://geocities.com/newtheatreottawa/
3. Alessandro Porco. "A Timely Defence". Canadian Notes & Queries (76).
4. Carmine Starnino. "on David 0'Meara: Arriving Early". Arc Poetry Magazine.
5. George Elliott Clarke. "Poetry, Non-Fiction, Fiction and Poetry Reviews". Maple Tree Literary Supplement.

External links

• "INTERVIEW DAVID O’MEARA", Sentinel Poetry #42
• "David O’Meara at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, spring 2009", Brick Books
• "Nibbling in other fields, 3", Lemon Hound, June 17, 2007
• "Downtown poet is no backyard man", Ottawa Citizen, May 5, 2007
• "David O’Meara", Kingston's Writers Fest