Later Emperors

Reviews / Votes

'The poems in Later Emperors surprise and delight like those incisive, wry and honest inscriptions that come down to us from antiquity seemingly having survived everything, not least history's ravages. At the same time, there's a deeply distinctive literary wit at work in this book as Jones's lines limn (and update) the lives of the fleetingly powerful with the acuity and concision of Martial, the wit and heart of Horace. How those later emperors resemble the tyrants of our own time! What a skilled guide to them we have in Evan Jones!'

Don Share 'Later Emperors shows it's possible to write with the "sound of sense" while creating an allegory for our time. Jones uses the Roman Empire as a blueprint for learning from history, But his poems are not judgmental. They let readers see venality and decline, drawing from a range of personas steeped in the capricious nature of twin political valences' power and appetite.'

Nyla Matuk, The Vehicule Press Blog 'Jones's spare, evocative, and imagistic verse offers, through half-glimpsed narratives of ambition and loss, a rumination on the transience of things in this world [...] Later Emperors is a lyrical book, somber yet lovely. Rare among works of poetry today, it offers not only beauty but also a wisdom rooted in time and timelessness.'

Benjamin Myers, World Literature Today 'The trajectory of Jones' style deepens and intensifies as the book goes on; its music beautifully controlled to gather and sharpen. But, although his subjects are all aristocrats, there isn't a grandiloquent, unnecessary phrase in the whole collection. Plutarch and Gibbon may sit behind Evan Jones but Later Emperors is a lovely, unique working, whose contemporary relevance is never overt but subtly and sensitively implicit.'

Ian Pople, The North 'These are quiet poems that manage, with remarkable and deceptive simplicity, to get under the skin. I am delighted that lockdown made me acquainted with them.'

Antony Mair 'Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones certainly appears to inhabit easily the worlds of first millennium Rome and early second millennium Byzantium brought to life in these poems [...] It is almost reassuring in our even more turbulent times, to hope that a future Evan Jones might cast an equally cold eye on the reign of our own later emperors.'

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