Tony Lopez

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Biographical note:  Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK), both published in 2000. His work is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). He is well-known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710300
ISBN-10:  1844710300
ISBN-13:  9781844710300
Author:  Tony Lopez
Title:  False Memory
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-03
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  False Memory is a major political poem of unusual ambition, written through the events of the 1990s, representing the damaged world that we know in all its violence and inequality. Making a radical turn to renew the language of political poetry, Lopez rejects the traditional search for authentic personal experience and its individual subjective voice. False Memory is overwhelmed by the globalized slogans of advertising, consumerism, and all the special jargons that atomize our contemporary experience from the spheres of marketing, biochemistry, military, medicine, management, history, finance, fashion, theory, poetry, painting and so on. Driven by an acute social anxiety that engages these public languages, the poem is comic in its proliferation of banality and impossible desire. The memory of Elizabethan sonnet sequences and the soft haze of their Arcadian sunlight meets the postmodern car-advert in a shiny retro-pastoral: a modular sequence of 110 fourteeners in gleaming halogen-lit chrome. “Virgil knew all about ethnic cleansing”.

Andrew Crozier writes that “In any of these stanzas language emits the toxic glow of an intertextuality for which a functioning media awareness is its sufficient context.… From the start this writing anticipates the post-modern as a future condition of the person”. Widely anthologized and excerpted in poetry journals throughout the English-speaking world, False Memory is published complete for the first time by Salt in 2003.

Table of contents:
Corneal Erosion
Studies in Classic American Literature
Assembly Point D
Blue Shift
Non-Core Assets
Brought Forward
Imitation of Life
Restricted Zone (slight return)
Speckled Noise
Always Read the Label
Radial Symmetry

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Excerpt from book:  

from Imitation of Life

City vending invites you to refresh yourself
With a fresh–brewed 3D simulator package
That clamps over the shoulder. By knowing size
And age at maturity, you can do hand–held:
You can split chaos from pure noise or fold it back in.
Target species caught at sea by hand or in nets,
Lost to medicine forever. A new shipment
Requires its own newsletter to be set up
In woven nomadic colours. No longer feeds.
Soon we could all be eating it. Knowledge hunger
A sudden decline in muscle cells. Wet data
Always begins with some injury or need.
Narrative formats in our wet brains,
Extraterrestrial garbage. No longer breeds.

Review quote:  Salt published by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year, Tony Lopez’s False Memory (£8.95): a series of sonnet sequences collaging and remixing the white noise of 1990s Britain into a disorienting, sometimes hilarious, often sinister, and always satirical challenge.

Robert Potts
The Guardian, December 6 2003

Review quote:  My favourite book of this year was Tony Lopez’s False Memory (Salt), a collection of cento-like sonnet sequences which samples and blends the white noise of 1990s Britain – economics, politics, genetics, fashion, real estate, entertainment, literature – in a surreal and satirical collage, sinister, elegantly amusing, and ultimately asking demanding political questions.

Robert Potts
New Statesman, December 2003

Review quote:  Tony Lopez’s intricate sonnet sequence (a shorter version was published in 1996) is called False Memory, a wonderfully deceptive title for no one ‘remembers’ better than Lopez, for whom everything that happens, that he reads about or witnesses, becomes grist for the poetic mill. These eleven sets of ten linked unrhymed sonnets, written primarily in alexandrines, are full of startling aperçus and unexpected wisdom. And yet nothing is obvious in Lopez’s poetic universe, alternately commonsensical and surreal, down-to-earth and utterly fantastic. The book’s ‘casualness’ is highly crafted and designed: one reads through the sequence without wanting to pause for breath, its poetic premise being that ‘deferred closure is our only chance of attendance / When we finally step out of the taxi and begin to play.’

Marjorie Perloff

Review quote:  I’ve been engrossed in False Memory: the clean implacability of the style is arresting – and to a wretched Faustian like myself – even lovely. The world I see is very like the world I see in these poems, and there are many ways of registering being stunned. ‘Brought Forward’ is to me beyond praise.

Jerome J. McGann

Review quote:  Lopez’s writing, more than ever, engages with dystopian anxiety the grievous fictions of contemporaneity: it is beset and irked by its inexaustible material on every occasion, but by its denial to Lopez of his own voice, so fully has he read himself into and written himself out of it, genuine horror is forestalled.

Andrew Crozier