Synopsis
Poetry. David Bromige has said of DEVOLUTION: I have been waiting for this poetry a long time, a poetry politically relevant and at the same time unapologetic in its confidence. These works are completely current, and history will welcome them again and again. The shock of their forms makes us recognize 'the new world order,' not alone through the deliberations that precede their construction, but by a daemonic ability, a something which springs on the near side of explanation, and this current runs under the reference-nets, rising and dipping like the sacred Alph.
Reviews
This second Stateside collection from England's Lopez (False Memory) brings a great range of demanding verse-techniquesAfrom collage and jump-cut to acrid ironic voiceoverAto the topic of the emerging marketplace. Lopez culled the 25 poems here from numerous U.K. small-press editionsAaccounting, in part, for the book's stylistic variety. After a rather lengthy "Jump Start," the poems proceed in alphabetical order. The truly remarkable "A Path Marked with Breadcrumbs" seizes the bombed-over, post-post-modern, self-suspicious territory somewhere between Tom Leonard and Mark Levine: "The collapsed addict mother, passed out/ under a hedge in the nineteenth century/ knows the colonial economy/ in point of fact," Lopez instructs; "For the consumption of opium or diet food/ see cultural ideal, see anorexic fix." "No-one Takes a Profit" muses on medical technology and war victims during a bicycle ride in snow; the skillfully torqued "Holding On" interrogates the lyric impulse sparked by a seaside walk. Against these prickly, finely disciplined poems, Lopez sets a number of wilder, unpunctuated short-lined works like "After," which flow in continuous, preposition-driven enjambment. The book's title refers, in Britain, to the transfer of power from London to Scotland and Wales: though few of the poems concern that particular policy, political wariness infuses, and lends strength to, the whole volume. The poet's efforts "to illustrate/ the self and its culture" give him only a few tones, but plenty of sharp ideas and forms. Ambitious, startling, bizarre, obsessive and often successful, Lopez's poems are an able foe of unchecked globalization. (July)
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