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