Now - Softcover

Brendan Kennelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852247495 ISBN 13: 9781852247492

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

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 was 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.

About this title

About the Author

Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) was 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 published over 30 books of poetry, including Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), which includes the whole of his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain (1998). He was 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 anthology The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me – co-edited with Neil Astley – is due from Bloodaxe in April 2022.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852247495
• ISBN 13: 9781852247492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104