"We have chosen the title of Delmore Schwartz's poem as the anthology’s title, The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me, for several reasons. Poems are written because of various kinds of "withness"; the sense of mortality, failure in love, the challenge of history, the nature of consciousness, dreams, loneliness, prejudice, inexplicable hatreds, the urge to make sense of confusion, the seething need to protest against forms of injustice, to talk to somebody about things only partly grasped or understood, or not grasped or understood at all but hurtful and pressing, violating sleep, miscolouring daylight’s encounters and images, the sense of suffering an appetite that can never really be fed… Every poem is an act of faith in that imaginative momentum; every poem longs to connect with that energy whether it be pressingly immediate or blatently ignored. This is the connecting power that enables Schwartz, for example, to bring the heavy bear lumbering into our lives. Our dialogue with the gross, barging presence follows that moment of admission. Our hope, as editors, is that we have provided an anthology of poems marked by dialogue and connection, although these poems may be, usually are, born of the awareness of mortality, failure, inadequacy, loss, absurd or gross caricatures or perversions of what we take to be reality. Why not have it out, once and for all, with the heavy bear who goes with us?" - Brendan Kennelly

‘The title The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me comes from a Delmore Schwartz poem… The editors use the title as a way for Brendan Kennelly to “talk about the poems he loves”. In a warm and affectionate preface, Astley writes that he and Kennelly “wanted this anthology to embody our conviction that poetry is a force for change”… And if, as Kennelly notes in the introduction, poetry is "a kind of pitiless education", he writes less pitilessly about these chosen poems and more with a mischievous kind of generosity.' - Paul Perry, Sunday Independent

‘He [Brendan Kennelly] has been called ‘a ballad maker on an epic scale’ and the selection of poems on the Leaving Cert syllabus certainly captures his epic range and fearless approach to poetry.’ - Elaine Dobbyn, Irish Independent (Poets in Focus)

‘In a very real sense this anthology, the feel and soul of it, has everything of Kennelly’s warmth, bigness of heart and generosity of spirit... An exemplary anthology has been created here, a teaching instrument, but also a Rescue Remedy for every wilting soul in the world of poetry.... In completing the task first begun with his old Irish friend, Neil Astley has given us one of the most inspiring teaching instruments that writing teachers could ever hope to have as they stand before a class, wondering how to begin. Well, they can begin here.’ - Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books

‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me – 100 classic poems chosen by Neil Astley and Brendan Kennelly – is all about the conversation…The conversation between Kennelly and Astley, which began in 19956, spawned a special collaboration, showcasing Kennelly’s signature passionate stance.’ - Martina Evans, The Irish Times

Both editors are renowned communicators of poetry: Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) as one of Ireland’s best-loved poets, as Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a popular cultural commentator on Irish television; Neil Astley as founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and editor of the Staying Alive anthology series. This long awaited anthology is published in the UK and Ireland on the late Brendan Kennelly's 86th birthday, 17th April 2022.

Neil Astley
    11    Preface: The Making of the Heavy Bear
Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966)
    19    Introduction: The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    25    ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547)
    27     'Wyatt resteth here'
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
    30     ‘Thou blind man’s mark’
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
    32     ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’
Chidiock Tichborne (1558–1586)
    34     Elegy for Himself
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
    36     Elegia VI
Sir Walter Ralegh (1552–1618)
    40     The Lie
Robert Southwell (?1561–1595)
    44     The Burning Babe
Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
    46     Since There’s No Help
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
    48     Sonnet 73: ‘That time of year…’
Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
    50     ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’
Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
    53     What if a Day
John Donne (1572–1631)
    55     The Flea
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
    58     On My First Son
Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
    60     Gather Ye Rosebuds
Henry King (1592–1669)
    62     Exequy upon His Wife
George Herbert (1593–1633)
    67     Love III
Edmund Waller (1606–1687)
    69     Go, Lovely Rose
Richard Crashaw (1612/3–1649)
    71     The Flaming Heart
Richard Lovelace (1618–1658)
    74     To Althea from Prison
Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672)
    76     A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment
Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)
    79     They Are All Gone into the World of Light!
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
    82     To His Coy Mistress
John Milton (1608–1674)
    86     from Paradise Lost
Thomas Traherne (1637–1674)
    89     Dreams
John Dryden (1631–1700)
    93     from Absalom and Achitophel
John Oldham (1653–1683)
    95     from The Third Satire of Juvenal, imitated
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
    101     A Description of a City Shower
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
    104     Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
    107     from London: A Poem
Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
    114     An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard
Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
    120     from Jubilate Agno
Oliver Goldsmith (c.1730–1774)
    125     from The Deserted Village
William Cowper (1731–1800)
    129     The Poplar-Field
William Blake (1757–1827)
    131     The Tyger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
    134     Kubla Khan
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
    138     Upon Westminster Bridge
Lord Byron (1788–1824)
    140     Darkness
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
    146     Ode to the West Wind
John Keats (1795–1821)
    152     Ode to a Nightingale
Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
    158     I Remember, I Remember
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
    160     Tithonus
John Clare (1793–1864)
    163     I Am
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
    165     My Last Duchess
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
    169     How do I love thee?
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)
    171     Stanzas (attr.)
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
    173     Remembrance
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
    176     Dover Beach
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
    180     Remember
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1892)
    182     Sudden Light
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
    184     Native Moments
Emily Dickinson (1822–1888)
    186     Because I could not Stop for Death
Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
    188     Renouncement
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899)
    190     The Windhover
George Meredith (1828–1909)
    200     Lucifer in Starlight
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
    202     Luke Havergal
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
    205     from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
A.E. Housman (1859–1936)
    215     Good creatures do you love your lives
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
    217     The Voice
Charlotte Mew (1869–1928)
    219     Madeleine in Church
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956)
    227     The Listeners
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
    229     The Road Not Taken
Edward Thomas (1878–1918)
    232     Adlestrop
Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)
    234     Break of Day in the Trenches
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)
    236     Base Details
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
    238     Strange Meeting
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
    241     The Second Coming]
    242     Leda and the Swan
Hart Crane (1899–1932)
    247     My Grandmother’s Love Letters
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
    249     Snake
Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
    253     Sonnet: What my lips have kissed
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
    255     The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
    257     A Grave
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
    259     The Snowman
Elinor Wylie (1885–1928)
    261     Full Moon
E.E. Cummings (1894–1962)
    262     ‘next to of course god america i’
Archibald MacLeish  (1892–1982)
    264     Ars Poetica
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
    267     The Journey of the Magi
Patrick Kavanagh (1905–1967)
    270     Shancoduff
    270     Epic
    276     Brendan Kennelly: ‘A Man I Knew’
Ruth Pitter (1897–1992)
    277     The Coffin Worm
Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977)
    279     ‘Anger lay by me all night long’
Sheila Wingfield (1906–1992)
    281     from Beat Drum, Beat Heart
W.H. Auden (1907–1973)
    286     In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Keith Douglas (1920–1944)
    289     How to Kill
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)
    291     Prayer Before Birth
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
    295     Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight
Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
    297     The River God
Ted Hughes (1930–1998)
    299     The Thought-Fox
    300     from The Burnt Fox
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
    302     Morning Song
Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
    304     Living
Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)
    305     September Song
Austin Clarke (1894–1974)
    307     The Redemptorist
W.S. Graham (1918–1986)
    310     The Beast in the Space
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)
    312     Diving into the Wreck
Michael Longley (born 1939)
    316     Wounds
Derek Mahon (1941–2020)
    319     A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
    324     One Art
Derek Walcott (1930–2017)
    326     Love after Love
Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
    327     Aubade
Anne Stevenson  (1933–2020)
    330     Poem for a Daughter
Ken Smith (1938–2003)
    332     Being the third song of Urias
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
    334     from Sweeney Astray
Eavan Boland (1944–2020)
    340     The Journey

    348    References
    352    Acknowledgements