**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD 2022
**
FINALIST FOR THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARD 2022
Words 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
