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"
