False Memory (Salt Modern Poets)

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.