Overview
Later Emperors is a timely quartet of verse tales recounting vaunting ambitions and spectacular failures. 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 dead: 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. 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. Author Biography
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, 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) and his British debut collection Paralogues was published by Carcanet in 2012.
