David O'Meara – författare

Marked by reflectiveness and mature insight, O''Meara''s keen sense of lyric structure and subtle cadences explore in contexts both historical and personal the tension between established knowledge and discovery - the centre and horizon of our unfixed selves. These poems - ambitious, rooted, exuberant and controlled, informed by a certain restlessness - unfold in evocative tones of voice to propel a narrative at one intelligent and charismatic, far-ranging yet focussed. A remarkable debut.

Marked by reflectiveness and mature insight, O'Meara's keen sense of lyric structure and subtle cadences explore in contexts both historical and personal the tension between established knowledge and discovery - the centre and horizon of our unfixed selves. These poems - ambitious, rooted, exuberant and controlled, informed by a certain restlessness - unfold in evocative tones of voice to propel a narrative at one intelligent and charismatic, far-ranging yet focussed. A remarkable debut.

Award-winning poet David O’Meara captures one family’s precarious balance between misery and hope in his debut novel.

Twenty-year-old Georgia is reeling from severe depression after the death of her best friend when she arrives in South Korea. Everyone teaching English is there for one of two reasons—adventure or escape—and she quickly falls in with a group of other foreigners. She eases into a life of late-night bars, riotous student protests and surfing until some unexpected news forces her to face the problems she has left behind.

Hugo Walser is bound for Barcelona to publicly confront the man he’s convinced is presenting a keynote speech about Hugo’s controversial failure as an architect. Determined to drink away his pain until the big event, Hugo rambles through the city, distracted by thoughts of how he’s failed his family. When the police call to investigate the disappearance of his ex-wife Sarah Trimble, Hugo turns his attention to all he stands to lose.

Meanwhile, Sarah, a high-end real estate agent, has been duped out of her life savings by a con man. En route to sell her last asset, the neglected family cottage in Gatineau, she’s derailed when her car is caught in a flash flood. Alone and desperate, she seizes one last chance to right a wrong.

Following a modern family’s dysfunction, Chandelier is a three-part portrait of a young adult and her divorced parents as they navigate profound loss and disappointment and the crux between despair and optimism.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD 2022 FINALIST FOR THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARD 2022Words like radio waves, bouncing off the spectres of mortality, middle age, and the mundane. Arriving at middle age was a decisive experience for David O’Meara, standing equidistant to the past and future with its accompanying doubts and anticipations, inviting re-evaluation of past goals, confronting personal loss, and the death of his father and friends. These are the masses on radar, indistinct but detectable existential presences encroaching, and in the center of the radar is the lyric 'I' sweeping its adjacent experience. Poems like "I Carry a Mouse to the Park Beside the Highway," "I Keep One Eye Open and One Eye Closed," and "I Sleep as the Volcano Ash Falls like Snow,” usher the reader through thematic corridors of memory, fracture, and recovery. Embracing uncertainty and incorporating seasonal forecasts, humour, trivia, satire, politics, the environment, loss, and the mundane, these poems are a detection system signaling a paradox of meanings."Masses on Radar exhibits a stunning mastery of poetic craft. O’Meara has the talent and technique to turn almost anything into riveting poetry, but these poems do not coast: they dig deep, bringing to vivid life a remarkable array of subjects, experiences, emotions, and interior worlds. These poems summon quotidian encounters, sometimes conferring them with unexpected beauty, sometimes breathing new and sudden problems into them. O’Meara’s sparse language lifts the veil on our human failings, the limits of our vision, and in so doing satisfies." – Archibald Lampman Award Judges