The Book of Judas

The Book of Judas is an epic achievement and as over the top as the subject deserves. This is poetry as base as heavy metal, as high as the Holy Spirit flies, comic and tragic, from litany to rant, roaring at times, soaring at other times. Like David in the Psalms, like Robert Johnson in the blues, the poet scratches out Screwtape letters to a God who may or may not have abandoned him, and of course to anyone else who is listening. -- Bono * Sunday Independent * This is our most ambitious work of literature since Beckett's prose trilogy... It is a labyrinthine confessional, clamorous with sin, guilt and malice, with no hint of absolution. The gesture of betrayal reshapes itself in a thousand promiscuous writhings - sexual, political, social economic; the hells of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch rendered in steel-glass corridor, pedestrian arcade, academic cloister, with devils and damned in cashmere, denim, corduroy, polyester... It is the work of moral terrorism, a modern sensibility struggling with medieval demons. You would have to fare far to encounter in literature or life such naked fear - and its attendant self-loathing - so bravely confronted. The Book of Judas is magisterial, a work of supreme technical maturity. -- Augustine Martin, * Irish Independent *

Brendan Kennelly's Book of Judas, a 400-page epic poem in twelve parts, became the number one bestselling book in Ireland. As well as receiving rapturous reviews, Brendan Kennelly won the Sunday Independent/Irish Life Award for the book and earned the ultimate accolade of `Kerryman of the Year'. Not merely lost but irredeemable, Kennelly's bitterly articulate Judas speaks, dreams and murmurs - of past and present, history and myth, good and evil, of men, women and children, and of course money - until we realise that the unspeakable perpetrator of the apparently unthinkable, in penetrating the icy reaches of his own world, becomes a sly, many-voiced critic of ours. The full-sized Book of Judas is no longer available, usurped by The Little Book of Judas, a distillation of that literary monster, purged to its traitorous essence.