“Salt published by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year, Tony Lopez’s False Memory, 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, 6 December 03
"My favourite book of this year was Tony Lopez’s False Memory, 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 03
“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, Jacket
“A garden of Boccaccio attacked by chainsaws, or a Black Magic advert with a bloody ending: as if Baudrillard had invaded our lives far more deeply than we could have imagined.” Douglas Oliver, British Institute, Paris.
“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, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia
“Tony Lopez’s intricate sonnet sequence 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 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, it’s 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, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Stanford University
