Men of the Same Name

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.