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Evan Jones

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  • Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones lives in Manchester. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2003), was a finalist for the Governor-General's Literary Award for Poetry. He co-edited Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010) and his British debut, Paralogues, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He is Lecturer in English at The University of Bolton.
    Praise for Evan Jones '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.'

    The High Window 

    '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

    '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
    '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 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
    Evan Jones is an intelligent, allusive poet who has elegantly synthesized his roots in Greek culture. These quietly serious poems throw up glimpses of dream and myth, and do so in a context of real thoughtfulness, free of rhetoric but rich in formal control.
    Fiona Sampson
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