What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate.

Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.