The Vicinity

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

This book won the Archibald Lampman Award and was short-listed for the
Trillium Prize. O’Meara writes with a strong sense of form. Once in a
while he falls into the formalist habit of describing the banal with
great precision, but usually the poems are freighted with wit or pathos.
O’Meara’s erudition is displayed by his updating of W.H. Auden’s
brilliant “Letter to Lord Byron” in a work called “Letter to
Auden.” Like the English master, O’Meara’s poems often hold an
uneasy and interesting place between light verse and lyric power. He
should be careful not to reach poetic middle age too quickly: here and
there he’s prone to the avuncular or sententious. But the book is
first-rate.