Archived Review:

reviewed by Jennifer LoveGrove, George Murray, and Paul Vermeersch

David O'Meara's first book, Storm Still, was published through the McGill-Queen's University Press Harbinger Poetry Series. 

Is The Vicinity as good a book as Storm Still? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What's better: raw, honest innocence or gleaming, skilled craftsmanship? A difference of opinion leads us to question our criteria for judging second books.

Poets Jennifer LoveGrove and Paul Vermeersch join solo Ninja Murray for a looksee.  

GEORGE: Well, I have been waiting for David O'Meara's second book forever. I was floored by the range and strength of his first book, Storm Still. But I found myself somewhat nervous at the prospect of reviewing The Vicinity for Bookninja. What if I didn't like it as much? What if it was no good? Second books are almost always the hardest, especially when your first book was so damn good. 

Well, I confess: I don't like The Vicinity as much as I liked Storm Still. The Vicinity lacks Storm Still's youthful glow, and suffers from an excess of high concept. Storm Still's strength was in its range of ability, voice, and character. It was readable in the way that good novels are. That said, however, I find The Vicinity a much more mature and skilled book. It is still readable and is far beyond the average offering of poetry in this country. First, second, fourth, eighth book. Yet it is missing something, something I hope you two can help me put my finger on. Innocence? Naivety? Purity? The problem with reviewing stellar poets like O'Meara, Ken Babstock, Anne Simpson, et al. is that their own talent works against them to a degree. It's not enough for O'Meara to be merely good, I want him to blow me away. And I am worried that large parts of The Vicinity don't do that.

Jen for the block?

JENNIFER: Well George, I hope you weren't spoiling for a fight, because I don't entirely disagree with you. Overall, I like The Vicinity. I think there are moments when it is successfully mind-blowing, in a quietly subtle and impactful way. However, I found that the "mind-blowing-ness" (George, you started it with that phrase!) to be inconsistent. What I do disagree with is when you say it "suffers from an excess of high concept." I think when he is most contemplative and philosophical is the point at which some of these poems succeed the most. A good example is in "The Valley Temples of Egypt", where the abstract is tempered with just a bit of the concrete at the end: 

I need the steep obliterating fall
of something deep and blank; that pharaonic
stillness of four thousand years

less of history hoping to know
what eternity is, and come so close
it seems further away, like squinting to glimpse

the eyelash on your own eyeball.

As for comparisons to Storm Still, that raises a contention. While we always want writers and artists to live up to their potential, should they always be held accountable to live up to previous work? Sometimes, yes, but they (or we, as I suppose the three of us are also poets!) must be allowed the space to move, change, explore, and that shouldn't be discouraged, otherwise that same potential doesn't get to evolve with the writer. We don't want variations on the same for a writer's subsequent book, at least, I don't.

PAUL: It isn't really important to me how The Vicinity, for better or worse, stacks up against Storm Still. George, you've made it a point in your own poetic career to give each of your books its own identity, and I think that is what O'Meara has done with The Vicinity. What's important to me is not whether it's better or worse than his earlier book, but that it is a different book. If I have to compare it to Storm Still, if only to put the comparison behind us so we can concentrate on the merits of the present volume, I'd say that The Vicinity is more overtly contemplative, as Jennifer points out, than its predecessor, more studied, more austere overall. For the most part, when I read Storm Still, I get the feeling of poems emanating outward from within the poet. The Vicinity is less intimate-feeling, and for me there's a sense of the poet absorbing the poetry from somewhere outside himself, from the wider world, and translating it into his own language. Still, reading The Vicinity this way is an over-simplification, one that is confounded by poems like "To a Friend", "Fess Up", and "Walking Around". To say that The Vicinity is less intimate than O'Meara's first book is not to say it's not at all personal. The poetic "I" is everywhere in this collection and always at the centre of the world from which the poems are gathered.

I think what makes second books so difficult, both to write and to review critically, is that the author has almost unlimited time to fashion a first book. First books come out when they're ready. For second books there's a pressure, a sense of deadline. I'm not suggesting that O'Meara rushed The Vicinity into being, though if the whole of it feels less organic, less naïve, or more formulaic that Storm Still, then that is probably because it is. And by 'formulaic' I don't mean it was composed over a template like third-rate genre fiction, rather, it seems to me the book's structure follows a formula created for this collection in particular, a planned investigation of certain subjects: first, the inanimate infrastructure around us, and second: how we, as living things, inhabit that infrastructure, how the construction of our own vicinities informs us, affects us. And as this type of collection, one that sets out to address a specific theme or themes rather than one that collects various poems on various topics written over an indeterminate period of time, I think The Vicinity is as successful as one could want it to be.

GEORGE: Interesting point about unlimited time to work on a first book, and yet wholly false, I think, in practical terms. So many people rush that first book. I think O'Meara's success with Storm Still owed much to the fact that he didn't rush it. And I don't think he's rushed The Vicinity either. You can see the careful attention and craftsmanship in each line here. Part of my problem with the text lies with that missing, yet indefinable, quality I mentioned earlier. I feel as though some of the poems, particularly in the first section, are weaker perhaps BECAUSE they've been worked so heavily. This is what I mean by high concept: a section of poems dedicated to building materials. It would be one thing if the poems were autonomous from one another, but the titles bind them into a kind sequence. Now this may sound hypocritical coming from someone who writes book-length sequences, but I think that in this case we have a section of poems that want to go in different directions and explore different ideas (not in different voice, the voice is very strong and cohesive) but have been bound together forcibly, muscled by the author's will. And it goes beyond the mere imprisonment inherent in any collection: it is a wilful binding of poems into a high concept that might not benefit the poems themselves, but definitely matches some idea the author had. O'Meara is a smart guy and has big ambitions for these poems, but somehow I feel as though the poems wanted something different. It's like the over-zealous parent badgering a child about success in whatever field (here in Canada, usually hockey). Do you see what I mean?

Now that all said, I want to get to praising the book. I think David O'Meara is one of a handful of young poets who represent an important turning point for young poets in this country. He works in a fashion that both encompasses and discards the Canadian poetic tradition and embraces a much more cosmopolitan worldview. Unless I am mistaken, this is a fellow who has read much Holderlin, Mallarme, Auden, Celan, Montale, Heaney/Muldoon/Armitage, and a whole whack of Russians. And that's just his poetic heritage. I suspect he's also an avid lover of visual art and science history. 

He is also conscious of both traditional rhyme and form and skewed variations thereof. His verse pays homage to all these things without being derivative. That's no small feat. The synthesis of these influences is not enough to impress me; ideally, everyone should have read the above names. It is the ability to assimilate hundreds of years of influence into a singular voice that can explore tradition while remaining firmly entrenched in, and relevant to, the present.

JENNIFER: I concur that there is something amorphous and unnameable that is at times lacking in The Vicinity, but that is primarily because sometimes it is quite present. There is a certain kind of insightfulness and/or spontaneity that surfaces thrillingly in some poems, and is absent in others, and the ones without that quality suffer for it. 

I don't want to come across as too negative here because that would not be accurate to my overall opinion. When he's on, O'Meara's on, so naturally I wanted more of that, and less of the overworked or overwrought quality that George has identified. A piece like "Poem For King Kong", for example, contains this vibrancy I craved more of. At first it seems almost playful, sure it's for King Kong, but it has this undercurrent of terror of losing control. It starts off with a building that "unrolls a shadow blocks-long" and that is how the poem moves: with a momentum and subtle urgency cast over the reader. And it works so well because of how he uses the language, the inventiveness and unexpected combinations, both in meaning and in sound, the "haw haw haw" and "ah", and my favourite, "Oh peripheral / nudged-aside being, count them as you fall."

Actually, I just noticed how well he uses those hyphenated constructions, "blocks-long" and "nudged-aside", that's tricky to do, and he does that throughout the book. That vitality in poems like the one I mentioned, as well as "From a Stopped Train" and "Abandoned Movie-House", really raises the bar on the collection. He gives us "the rubbed rheumy eye of a window, still intact, / that blinks when a cloud blots the sun" so when I read a poem like "Houses in Small Towns", I am frustrated by its staid and almost-didactic tone; it feels too deliberated alongside the gems. 

I think things really get going in the second section, "Walking Around". "The Weather" is full of power and sharpness, a wildness in personification and sound. The "wind, as civil servant, pushing papers", and "interrogation by sun, that / sadistic senorita" and "streetlights picket the city limits" - well I could quote the entire poem here, quite happily. A poem like that, as well as "Thinking and Feeling", has the "indefinable" quality that I think George is referring to. I think it is when he veers off from the "inanimate infrastructure" that Paul mentions is when the poems are more pure, and can be quite thrilling.

PAUL: Certainly, some poems in this collection are stronger, or more fulsome, than others. I find it difficult to think of a collection I've read for which the same could not be said, but still I think the strengths of this collection greatly outweigh its relative weaknesses, and even the least fulsome of these poems demonstrate the notable skill and ability of the poet. Still, I'd argue that poems like "Brickwork", "Structural Steel", "Glass", and "Wire" are much more than examples of mere workmanship. For me, there is a curiosity driving these poems akin to scientific investigation, and there's a sense of deep compassion in the realization of them. The brick wall of the opening poem represents a contemporary Atlas, destined always to work, to hold up, to bare load from above. O'Meara writes, "It hasn't rested, though idle all these years." And in the poem "Concrete" O'Meara ponders how the very material that surrounds us has something to do with how we feel about our lives, and how we live. The grey, unreflective surface of concrete reflects something back to us after all: perhaps a boredom, a malaise, a dissatisfaction with they way things are, with the way things have come together in our lives. He writes:

-wall, pillar, sidewalk, the steady civic
glue of our metropolis that faces the pedestrian
unjust jury who, in turns, condemn your ugliness

but every day embrace and raise the likes of you
from dust. What we stare into stares into us.

I like the grace of O'Meara's language here, and its concrete-like hardness, and the sadness it invokes from simple, lifeless matter. It moves me, albeit in a different way than his more humane poems do (those poems Jennifer points out above), but it is precisely O'Meara's ability to coax subtle epiphanies from so wide a range of material that impresses me about The Vicinity. George, you take issue with the ordering of these poems at the beginning of the first section, which I assume you think are the weakest, suggesting that O'Meara is artificially forcing a gestalt upon them as a group, but I wonder, given the uniformity of their themes, their purposeful evolution from the simplest elements (bricks) to the most complex (life), if any other grouping would have been more successful in your view, or more to your liking.

GEORGE: (Let's see if we can't wrap this up in this next go 'round.) I think it's important to reiterate here that we are, particularly I am, holding O'Meara to a higher standard than we might another poet. Whether that's fair or not is another matter, but obviously after Storm Still all three of us had high hopes for The Vicinity. I think that, were I not forced to play devil's advocate as I have been here, I might say that O'Meara could be up for an award for this book. He's got a kind of cross-over appeal between younger readers (ie, 20' and 30's) and older (ie, the rest of you). O'Meara's pal and number one supporter Ken Babstock has the market cornered on hip, young, urban poet. Mean was one of the single best books of poetry I have ever read. But O'Meara is going in a different direction, seemingly deliberately so. Not to say that he is consciously writing something different from his friend and mutual mentor, but that he is creeping away from both the "young" and the "hip" in a very deliberate way. In subject matter, form, and style, his work is reading older, more mature, yet there is still something that keeps it current and relevant to people our age. What I miss, as I think I said earlier, is the rawness. Just as it's sad to kids grow up and lose innocence, it can be sad to see a poet grow from surprising intuition to calculated brilliance.

Take the poem "Fountain" (which I love):

Fountain

Not the intricate engineering wrought
by the hands of antiquity; not
the modern touch of electric pumps and tubes.
Not the micturition of famous cherbubs,

or efflux from a fish's Gillespie spout.
Not the lilies cloying there. Don't think about
them, or the rusting pennies that tourists
threw, or the ones clutched now, tightly, in their fists.

Not the marble General in his stirrups,
or the midnight reflection of the moon.

Just this pool that's stirred by the double spoon
of brassy, half-dressed lovers, in their cups.

Now, it just doesn't get any better than that. I mean, that's thoughtful, well-executed poetry. But is it raw? Not in the least. It's worked and crafted and honed and perfect. And what I fell in love with O'Meara for was the way Storm Still incorporated raw stories of playing football on the lawn across the page from skilled, but still seeking, ruminations on evolution and Darwin. This poem doesn't feel as though it's leading me somewhere. It feels as though it's standing somewhere beckoning me to come to it. Not that this is a bad thing, of course. It's just wholly other than what I had come to expect. 

Now I am sounding like what I hate: the reviewer who says, "Great book, but I wish you'd done it this way..." Shame on you, George. Next time I am hiring a devil's advocate instead of playing one myself....

JENNIFER: Paul, I like that you identify that "there is a curiosity driving these poems akin to scientific investigation, and there's a sense of deep compassion in the realization of them" - it's that insightful melding of the physical and structural world with the meditative and emotional that makes for some really visceral poems like "Thinking and Feeling." That is my new favourite in the book. I think that The Vicinity is one of those books that will keep getting better the more you return to it; I discover something new almost every time I go through it, which to me is a sure sign of the book's power. I just wish it was more consistent as a whole.

George, I think you're getting too concerned with categories in your last comments. I don't find it useful to put such distinctions between older/younger, over 40/ under 40, hip/consciously unhip; I don't see how it benefits anyone. I do agree that Babstock's Mean is incredible, but it never struck me as particularly "urban" or "hip"; more so that its sheer inventiveness makes it timeless, rather than fixed in any sort of "hipness". And your "cross-over appeal" remark about The Vicinity perplexes me: are the under 40 / over 40 readers' tastes and concerns really so different? I think it is all more radically personal and individual than that.

Now you could be right about its award nom potential, but really, does that matter? Those things are often fraught with strange choices and agendas and whims; I'd rather see less "awards" and more in-depth critical discussions of the work, like the good folks at Bookninja are facilitating...

This is a good point for me to stop at, as I'm beginning to meander from thoughts on The Vicinity into more general topics like age and shortlist angst and I'll save that for another forum.

PAUL: Well, it’s closing time. I guess the onus is on me to finish the pitcher so we can all go home. I agree with Jennifer that it’s probably irrelevant to read The Vicinity in terms of its relative “youth” or “hipness.” Equally, I don’t view the “rawness” that is seemingly lacking from the collection as a shortcoming. The gleam of polish doesn’t bother me, and it might signify the direction in which O’Meara-the-poet is developing, or it might not. For all we know his next book could be tar-tar by comparison to The Vicinity, though I doubt that it will be. Rawness versus polish is an aesthetic choice, Romantic tumult versus Classical refinement. I believe O’Meara chose to write these poems with surgical instruments and a fine-toothed comb, not with a hammer and torch. As poems belonging to this more rarefied aesthetic tradition, I think the bulk of them are exemplary. That’s how I read them, and that’s how I want to enjoy them.

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