Full Description
Men of the Same Name is
satirical, elegiac and memorable, bringing together lost books, burned
libraries, Goethe, the lives and deaths of Presocratic philosophers,
Paris, statues of Niobe, patterns in history, war, displacement, the
evils of ambition, and Pachynian tuna.
What if, Jones asks, instead of using the ancient world as a metaphor
for modern life, the poet uses modern life as a metaphor for the
ancient world? Working in this way between allegory and reality, the
book rethinks poetry's changing relationships to politics and our
historical moment.
A celebrated translator of Cavafy, here Jones blends translation
(Goethe, Lucian of Samosata, Diogenes Laertius) with original poetry so
that the world of his writing is distant yet familiar, both
unequivocally our own and boldly inventive.
