Developed over the course of fifteen years, Dimitris Lyacos' epics trilogy Poena Damni is a somber allegory exploring the utmost limits of the human condition. Nyctivoe forms the central panel; it concerns the staging of a verse play in a grim inner city setting, unfolding as a pattern of intermittent monologues - solitary vision of characters apparently in a state of trance. And while the setting suggests elements of realism (a creashed car; distant trains, fire, the beat of the sea), the text hovers on the brink of the metaphysical; dense and allusive, gream-like and fragmented, yet also concerned with linear narrative.