Later Emperors

by Evan Jones

Later Emperors is four poems, each of which approaches Roman history from a very different perspective. It is also four voices, each one concerned with the living and the voices of historians and moralists, voices of great (and not so great) emperors. Jones has written a book which is all the more for our time because it looks so clearly at other times and identifies in them familiar patterns, difficulties, ambitions and desires. History becomes a crystal ball in which the past chides the future, the same mistakes predicted and made again, the same injustices repeated. The Byzantine historians Michael Psellos and Anna Komnene reveal themselves as the significant chroniclers they always were. The book concludes with a retelling of Plutarch's 'Consolatio Ad Uxorem', in which Jones considers what we might hold on to in a world of suffering.

80 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2020

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]

Jones has also published a translation of Cavafy, not yet on sale in the usa, a work which must have had a deep impact on these poems, covering Cavafian subjects and situations—late Roman and Byzantine history. Interesting, vignette-like pieces in a flat kind of prose, often sly with irony.

2nd reading—the first sequence “Later Emperors” is a solid five-stars, the next two not quite as interesting, like the version of Plutarch. All strong solid writing, certainly one of the best new poetry collections of 2020, but the title sequence is the star.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We might like to disagree, / but he lived in an era / when the poets kept silent.” In Later Emperors, Evan Jones’ poetry collection, the rise and fall not of empires but of their rulers is skilfully, mercilessly insisted on. With a wide array of voices — ancient emperors “great (and not so great)”, historians Michael Psellos and Anna Komnene, Plutarch — four long poems, mostly taking the form of poem sequences, unravel in a swell of startling imagery, sharp and brisk and manifold characterisation, and an astute sense of philosophical urgency. The first and titular poem is broken up into several shorter section/poems, each one concerned with a different emperor through the Roman Empire, from Maximinus Thrax to Diocletian, the first emperor to voluntarily abdicate his position. There are detours in Queen Zenobia and Severina (perhaps the first woman to rule Rome) — “Let her remain at this peace. / Don’t warn her, I say, if you know better, / historian, priest, moralist, / from somewhere along, / don’t unwrite what I’ve written.” Empire is not exactly a triumph, fast fleeting: “The emperor toured his achievement, / but had already lost interest. All was well and already in the past.” And, elsewhere, “the despair, the rage and grief, / the heavy Roman armour, / the deep water, the long Goth / spears. The emperor’s body / was never found.” The poems build to a coda, ‘Plutarch to His Wife’, a striking finale, “willpower / pushing him forward.”

[Colin]

I'm not going to rate this; I didn't get much out of it, but (as so often with poetry) I suspect that's my failing rather than the poet's.