We’re thrilled to be presenting a live broadcast of David O’Meara’s outdoor in-person–masked, socially distanced, and double-vaccinated please–launch for his anticipated new collection,
Masses on Radar
. Don’t miss your chance to celebrate new work by the Archibald Lampman Prize and Ottawa Book Award-winning poet.
Limited seating is available on a first come, first served basis for those attending live on the back patio at
Spark Beer, 702 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, Ontario.
The launch will begin at 5:30 and our broadcast will begin at 5:45.
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 adetection system signaling a paradox of meanings.
O'Meara is a poet of the personal. Of the person. In and amongst the social documentary and human observation at which he excels, here is a writer prepared to put feelings on the line and to argue his case with the reader.
