Noble Gas, Penny Black

Winner of the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) and shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit 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 landscapes “felt / but never held, like wind over water.” O’Meara give us lucid, accurate detail and music at every turn, and is entangled enough with the world to make us ache. "[There are] lines from Noble Gas, Penny Black, where the syllables are, let me incautiously say, near-perfect."-Don Coles