Description:
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.
Brief description: Tony Lopez is an English poet of international repute. He was born in Stockwell in 1950 and grew up in Brixton, South London. He began work by writing fiction for newspapers and magazines, and had five crime and science fiction novels published before going to university at Essex and then Cambridge. He has received awards from the Wingate Foundation, the Society of Authors, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Arts Council England. His poetry is featured in The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard), Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (RSE), Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). His critical writings are collected in Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry (Salt) and The Poetry of W.S. Graham (Edinburgh University Press). He taught for many years at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first Professor of Poetry. He is married with two grown up children and lives in Exmouth in Devon.
Review Quotes:
"The pleasure of False Memory is its consistent wit - its challenge is that, in presenting back to us the world we live in, but making it newly strange, it makes no prescriptions of its own, and indeed can be read wholly pessimistically, from its first line ("And I don't see how we can win") to the defeat and irony readable in its last words. It may, alternatively, be read as an act of defiance, suggesting that an abused public language can be repossessed to some degree. Either way, it is a strikingly accomplished work of art." -Robert Potts, Times Literary Supplement, 2 January 2004.