Intro:

Hi, thanks for visiting my webpage. My name is Daniel O'Meara, I'm an author from Christchurch, New Zealand. I started writing poetry in 2013, under the pen name Mantera Jones, while I was living overseas in Germany (Berlin and partly in Potsdam) -- I published my first poetry chapbook in 2016. I returned to NZ in 2017, and published two more chapbooks the following year, and another in 2020. You can find links to electronic copies of these publications on the site. I'm working on some new stuff at the moment, and will post more writing to the webpage as I have it.

Notes on style:

In my poems I use stream-of-consciousness and what could be called 'objectivist' techniques, for want of a better term -- basically, including scientific jargon and other language which doesn't really belong in poems to achieve weird artistic effects, and to buck the trend of 'lyric' or 'ultra-subjective' poetry, which has become all but ubiquitous in our time. Funnily enough, poetry used to overlap with history, science and journalism, so in a way this attempt to expand the bounds of poetry is just a returning to earlier conceptions of the genre. Check out my writings and judge the success of my literary experiments for yourself -- I'm happy to hear constructive feedback or, what is even better, for people to share examples of their own work which demonstrate different approaches.

Although it will be obvious to anyone who takes a casual interest in literature, for clarity's sake I should stress that not all statements in the poems reflect my personal opinion -- they may be relays of popular or historical ideas, playing devil's advocate within the context of a dialogue, or an expression of the viewpoint of a real or fictional character. All these elements are mixed together in poetry (so long as you bear in mind that not all poetry is lyric poetry), and the boundaries between the viewpoint of the author/narrator and other dramatis personae in the poem is not always going to be clear. It is art. If you would like to know my personal opinions on politics, books or anything else, please look at what I post under the 'criticism' section of the website.