Now

Now is a fast and frenzied meditation on time, ageing, alienation and the pressures of living in the modern city. Each triplet in this book-length poetry sequence addresses the question: What is 'now'? With the brevity of a proverb, each three-liner offers a short, sharp perception which tries to capture or just grasp at the sliding identities of 'now', at the same time as it adds its quickfire nugget of wit or wisdom to the accumulating weight of the whole sequence. By the end of the book, Kennelly has taken us on a journey not just through time but through a dark night of the soul, through his own head and the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of people struggling to survive and find meaning in their lives. Now is published simultaneously with "When Then is Now", a trilogy of Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies which dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All three plays - Sophocles' "Antigone" and Euripides' "Medea" and "The Trojan Women" - focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes.