Paralogues

by Evan Jones

Paralogues, which takes its title from the Greek word for ballads', is the British début of an original Canadian poet and editor. Evan Jones explores Greek mythology, Roman and Byzantine history, art and travel, from contemporary perspectives. The myth of Actaeon is re-imagined in three ways, and Paralogues concludes with a sequence retelling the Byzantine folk ballad Constantine and Arete'. Translation is central to the collection, from the modern Greek of Miltos Sachtouris to the Austrian German of Raoul Schrott. Readers encounter people and places real and imagined: the lonely figure of the poet Cavafy in Victorian Liverpool, God in post-war Paris, the landscapes of Europe and North America at once familiar and unfamiliar.

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Evan Jones was born in Toronto. A dual citizen of Canada and Greece, he has lived in Britain since 2005.

He has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Manchester and has taught at York University in Toronto, and in Britain at the University of Bolton and Liverpool John Moores University. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (2003), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is co-editor of the anthology Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010).

Research interests include contemporary poetry and fiction, literature in translation, and post-colonial literature.

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as deft as his new book, Later Emperors, but charming in its near total refusal to focus on the mundanities of contemporary life so common to contemporary poetry. Narrative elements are prominent, though the “long poem” that concludes the volume got tedious for me.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

These seem poems that know the previous century – and the others preceding it - but land happily and full-throatedly in this one. In fact, time past, time present and even time future seem not so much overlaid, one on top of the other, or made to echo each other, but are made to seem coterminous with each other in playful and disorientating ways that prove quite beguiling - and, well, funny, wisecracking in ways the subjects don't lead you to expect.
Some take their origins or a stimulus in Fine Art – as well as other poets and poems – but one can imagine them in turn being changed back into cleverly bewildering collages.
The poems in the middle of the collection work best for me – or perhaps my ears and eyes grew more attuned – and many had me, from their eerie and often timeless (time-full?) settings and wry humour, imagining a Charlie Brown figure suddenly landed in a series of De Chirico paintings.
Some pick out religious subjects – Prayer for St Agatha, for example – but don’t seem god-haunted or breast-beating in the usual or expected ways, but fruitfully puzzled, even amused, by things of the spirit.
...our cries of ‘Come back to me’, to God and whoever,
go unanswered. No one falls asleep. Ships
sail over the desert and squirrels eat
from our hands. Taxis are yellow and films
end badly’.
Lines like this seem tuneful without us quite guessing quite where the music comes and, typically, they seem sensuously appealing without being obvious or indulgent
The closing sequence ‘Constantine and Arête’ – the paralogues or ballads referenced in the title – are knottier, the games and interests of the previous poems played out at a higher and more intricate level – need greater concentration than a first read but others - for me, the Three Acteons, How I Became One of My Poems, God in Paris and Cavafy in Liverpool - surprise, intrigue and delight, and seem primers for the more complicated games, fractured narrative and references in the sequence, and so they make you want to return to the collection again.