David O'Meara (born Pembroke, Ontario) is a Canadian poet.
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He was raised in Pembroke, Ontario. He lives in Sandy Hill, Ottawa, where he tends bar at The Manx Pub.
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]