Carcanet Online book launch: Later Emperors by Evan Jones

Online book launch with John Clegg

Join Carcanet Press online to celebrate the launch of Evan Jones‘s new poetry collection, Later Emperors. Hosting the reading will be fellow Carcanet poet, John Clegg, joining Evan to discuss the new work.

Audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will also be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along. Register here. Let us know you can make it through the Facebook event.

The event will begin at 19:00 and include a reading by Evan Jones. Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration here.

About the book: 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. 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.