Devolution

This second Stateside collection from England's Lopez (False Memory) brings a great range of demanding verse-techniques--from collage and jump-cut to acrid ironic voiceover--to the topic of the emerging marketplace. Lopez culled the 25 poems here from numerous U.K. small-press editions--accounting, 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)