Covers

Synopsis

As the title suggests, Covers is a deeply derivative book in which the poet, without even any pretence of originality, takes other well known literary works and makes his own versions or mashups, splicing them together with unlikely partners to create something unexpected, even monstrous. Imagine lyrics fashioned out of terror, displacement, anguish and fear. Any old slogan or newsprint or piece of linguistic junk is worked into a new engine set to orbit in virtual space. It is as if Marcel Duchamp and Damien Hirst were abroad in the poetry world and had met up with Kurt Schwitters: these dispatches are as literary as Charles Olson or Wendy Cope, radical as Kit Robinson and Rosmarie Waldrop and English as Philip Larkin or Denise Riley. The poems are cranky, obsessive, humane, unstable: ‘Are we not all Palestinian?’ ‘Is this Art history or mass immigration?’

‘In Photographs’ sees news stories of the late Blair era bear down upon a haunted and garrulous knot of anxiety that stands in for the recently vanished postmodern subject, as we search a blasted landscape of derailed trains and sliced-open transits for Kim Bauer, heroine of 24. Situationism filtered through 9/11 starlight, picks at a blister in public trust: Jack Straw, hung up by his thumbs, ‘looks worn out but handsome in Arab dress’.

A holocaust-memorial Talk Poem ‘Not Reading “After”’, homage to David Antin, revisits the premise trailed in Society of the Spectacle and enlists the ghost of Douglas Oliver to satirize the vacant publicity-hunger of the British royal family, still clinging-on in a deranged fancy-dress party we call democracy. Meanwhile the western allies begin to strafe Iraq and bulldozers flatten refugee camps in Gaza.

We catch glimpses and echoes of Ezra Pound’s impossible fascist epic The Cantos (of which the author himself famously wrote ‘I cannot make it cohere’) in the Raworth-style self-replicating minimalist stanzas of ‘Sequel Lines’, an anti-epic freighted with unscalable detail of modernist catch-phrases, contemporary theory and non-sequiturs. ‘The unified subject / was out of a job’.

Chief Seattle finds no resting place in ‘The Chief’ but is stumped on the stump, and has to contend with George W. Bush, rail privatisation, TV penalty shoot-outs, anti-social behaviour, The Priory, American and European genocidal history, and late echoes of the British poetry wars of the 1970s. MacSweeney lives on as lead guitarist for Van Morrison’s Street Choir, whose number one fan is in the White House.

In ‘Unfolding’ Ted Berrigan’s 1960s Sonnets, themselves collaged reworkings of would-be Keatsian love tokens and star-struck O’Hara fan mail, are reloaded with traces of London IRA terror, Brit Art chancers and impresarios, sampled insurance ads, the Srebrenica massacre, corrupt Labour politics, and England’s tourist industry conceived as screen-saver heritage kitsch.

Covers is a manifest treasure of the nation.

Praise for this Book

‘There’s an exceptional crispness of verbal attack throughout Covers as Tony Lopez samples wide swathes of cultural noise. The results are never encumbered by any poetizing feedback. But beyond the paradigms of ‘freeing the reader from cultural scripts’ Lopez’s no-nonsense displacements and recursions also provide a refreshingly various demonstration of some of poetry’s essential functions: political raillery; elegy; melancholy/amused registration of social life; and, at all points, a passionate belief in the intelligibility of language.’ —Bob Perelman

‘If False Memory was a grid laid expertly across the twentieth century – clicks and flickers still transmitting in the sieve’s scorched earth – this new work sidegrades to digital. In Covers military apology, software prompts, broadcast ready-mades and cultural theory destabilise each other amid elegy and affection: Tony Lopez creates poems with the nuanced tones and material detail of rich abstraction.’ —Richard Price

‘Is it all in the title? What Lopez covers – impossibly, brilliantly – is the culture; a culture he sings in versions of its own tunes. Here are the terrible events of our times communicated in the language of our times, which for all its failings Lopez somehow makes prophetic. The key note is speed and the theme is bombardment, and the object is the effort (ongoing) to stay humane. ‘Ready or not’, the first poem insists, because, well, that’s how it is, isn’t it. This is poetry for you now. Ready, or not.’ —David Herd

‘Covers takes us to many different places: to what lies between them in a book, to a medieval legal term carrying a whiff of clandestinity, and more recently, to singers recording another singer’s song. Tony Lopez’s new collection enters this covert territory and more, as he goes about inventing – in the old sense of ‘finding’ – and re-inventing experience. With wit and cool as well as a degree of protesting irony, he picks up the daily hum and humdrum out there (‘The pacifist star sported zero bling’). Fugues of linguistic collisions and incidents explore the bounds of sense and non-sense as Tony Lopez evacuates the lyric voice and ventriloquizes multivocally, performing a kind of crazed combinatory logic on perception.

‘The world is closer than you think’, he writes, and he makes its present state disturbingly feel so.’ —Marina Warner

‘Is it all in the title? What Lopez covers – impossibly, brilliantly – is the culture; a culture he sings in versions of its own tunes. Here are the terrible events of our times communicated in the language of our times, which for all its failings Lopez somehow makes prophetic. The key note is speed and the theme is bombardment, and the object is the effort (ongoing) to stay humane. ‘Ready or not’, the first poem insists, because, well, that’s how it is, isn’t it. This is poetry for you now. Ready, or not.’ —David Herd

Reviews of this Book

‘Experimental and fiercely intelligent, Lopez's work is not for lovers of Pam Ayres. That said, the terse, four and five-syllable lines, the phrases from contemporary journalism and Lopez's smart-bomb gaze on mainstream media discourse will be endearing to those who like poetry straight from the edge.

If the irritating ticks of the university-based writer are fully in evidence, from gathering taped speaker notes into a poem to images that give a new dimension to the semantics of obscurity, then this is nonetheless worthwhile writing. Salt Publishing – now surely Britain's most innovative publisher of contemporary poetry – also deserves serious praise for bringing Lopez to a wider public with this handsomely produced and edited hardback’ —James W Wood, Scotland on Sunday