{"id":10205,"date":"2014-01-16T14:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T09:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/the-long-game-david-omearas-a-pretty-sight\/"},"modified":"2023-02-14T15:28:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T10:28:58","slug":"the-long-game-david-omearas-a-pretty-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/the-long-game-david-omearas-a-pretty-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long Game: David O\u2019Meara\u2019s A Pretty Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"

After my first read of David O\u2019Meara\u2019s new book\u2014his fourth\u2014I was vaguely disappointed. By the time I finished reading it for the second time, I had been quietly blown away. There could be many explanations for the discrepancy between my two reactions, but I think the crucial factor is the subtle, nuanced ways that O\u2019Meara is playing the long game in A Pretty Sight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The crudest index of that long game, and of O\u2019Meara\u2019s artistic ambition, is the page count of the poems themselves. There are only thirty-two of them collected here, but they sprawl over ninety-odd pages. There are many short lyrics, but the defining features of the collection are the longer poems, including a dialogue between Socrates and Sid Vicious and a mesmerizing seventeen-page \u201crhapsodic\u201d sequence called \u201cCirca Now.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the book can be said to have a single theme, it is time. Be it moments or aeons, O\u2019Meara is obsessed with what decays and is destroyed over time, with what changes, but also with what, for better and for worse, remains the same. In the book\u2019s opening poem, the speaker, \u201cPoet Laureate of the Moon\u201d in an imagined future lunar colony, imagines the day when the space centre he inhabits will be discovered by an alien race and \u201cbecome our Lascaux.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the brief lyric \u201cMemento Mori,\u201d someone finds a bone in a pile of manure and the poem ends with her \u201cturn[ing] the thing over and over.\u201d This is a neat encapsulation of the recursive approach followed by O\u2019Meara as he recycles tropes, characters and occasionally phrases from poem to poem, period to period. He has said that this technique was informed by contemporary physics, but it also brings to mind Nietzsche\u2019s doctrine of the eternal recurrence and David Mitchell\u2019s Cloud Atlas<\/em>, which plays with that concept. Whatever the case, O\u2019Meara handles leitmotifs adroitly, which is one of the reasons it pays to reread A Pretty Sight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Another is its political urgency. One of the things that time does not erode is defiance and we get plenty of it in O\u2019Meara\u2019s collection. Besides Socrates and Sid Vicious, we meet, to name a few iconoclasts, Hans and Sophie Scholl, young anti-fascist pamphleteers executed in 1943; Osel Hita Torres, the Tibetan Buddhist tulku who rejected his destiny; and \u201cOld Hoss\u201d Radbourn, a nineteenth century baseball player who is the first known person to be photographed giving the finger. A key idea for O\u2019Meara is what he has called the \u201cinterstice between the necessary and a perceived frivolity.\u201d In the face of political turmoil, people in these poems turn to art; instead of standing still and waiting for death, they dance. The efficacy and purpose of art are questioned more than once by O\u2019Meara\u2019s speakers, but time and again art speaks for itself.<\/p>\n

Time makes fools of most would-be prophets, but I hope that in ages to come, if people are still detained by such arcane pursuits as poetry, and they possess the tools to decode our decayed idiom, a few folks might parse these poems and understand that it was ever thus.<\/p>\n

Zachariah Wells<\/strong> (www.zachariahwells.com<\/a>) lives in Halifax.<\/p>\n

TRAVELING ALONG AN INELUCTABLE ARC<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After my first read of David O\u2019Meara\u2019s new book\u2014his fourth\u2014I was vaguely disappointed. By the time I finished reading it for the second time, I had been quietly blown away. There could be many explanations for the discrepancy between my two reactions, but I think the crucial factor is the subtle, nuanced ways that O\u2019Meara […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2077,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"9928,10040,10343,11055","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1514,1994],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[170],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[3080,3106],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}