Poetry publisher Bloodaxe is launching a new anthology, in which editor Neil Astley has teamed up with the late Irish poet Brendan Kennelly to produce The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me – a selection of 100 classic poems from five centuries, with commentaries to go with each poem.

In its publicity material for the anthology, Bloodaxe says: “The heavy bear can be many things which go with the bearer: another self or alter ego, the burden of poetry or art, what weighs us down and makes us do what we don’t really want to do as well as what pulls us back to our selves, the animal side which makes us bearable or human.”

The anthology begins with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), and concludes with Eavan Boland, who died in 2020. The title of the anthology comes from a poem by Delmore Schwartz. Other poets include some major figures in Irish poetry that Brendan Kennelly knew personally as well as wrote about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland.

Brendan Kennelly died last year at the age of 85. The anthology will be published on 17 April 2022, which would have been his 86th birthday.

In a preface to the anthology Bloodaxe’s renowned editor Neil Astley said he began working with Kennelly on the anthology over 25 years ago. “We had no idea then that these conversations would take so long to be completed, or that reading Brendan’s commentaries now – after his only too recent passing – I would feel that he is still talking to me, and to everyone else, about the poems he loves.”

Among his commentaries, Brendan Kennelly explained the “several reasons” for choice of anthology title: “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 blatantly 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?”

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me is available from Bloodaxe at £14.99