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 (to borrow one of O’Meara’s formulations). O’Meara’s poem is a pantoum, a poetic form that recycles lines across stanzas (the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the immediately proceeding stanza, and so on and so forth). The poem’s form is an iconic rendering of the poem’s department store “escalator,” which cyclically runs “from the clearance shelves in the bustling concourse, / and up into 2nd, 3rd, 4th floors.” “Let’s get lost in everything / as we glance around,” begins the poem. It’s unclear, however, whether losing one’s self is even possible in such a scenario – Keats never had to negotiate his Negative Capability in a consumer-culture wonderland of buy buy buy and more more more!