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.

'Kennelly's capacity to strip himself and fight in naked combat with the giants that plague us, make him Ireland's most endearing and reckless poet' - mark patrick hederman 'His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life' - sister stanislaus kennedy 'He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us...a serious contribution to the nation's mental and spiritual well-being' - jim farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland’s most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for over 30 years, and retired from teaching in 2005. He now lives in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He has published more than 30 books of poetry, including Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (2004), which includes the whole of his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain (1998). He is best-known for two controversial poetry books, Cromwell, published in Ireland in 1983 and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1987, and his epic poem The Book of Judas (1991), which topped the Irish bestsellers list: a shorter version was published by Bloodaxe in 2002 as The Little Book of Judas. His third epic, Poetry My Arse (1995), did much to outdo these in notoriety. All these remain available separately from Bloodaxe, along with his more recent titles: Glimpses (2001), Martial Art (2003), Now (2006), Reservoir Voices (2009), The Essential Brendan Kennelly: Selected Poems, edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley, with audio CD (2011), and Guff (2013). His Journey into Joy: Selected Prose, edited by Åke Persson, was published by Bloodaxe in 1994, along with Dark Fathers into Light, a critical anthology on his work edited by Richard Pine. John McDonagh’s critical study Brendan Kennelly: A Host of Ghosts was published in The Liffey Press’s Contemporary Irish Writers series in 2004.