The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me is the ultimate reader's companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from five centuries with lively "companion" commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem. 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 editors' selection ranges from Wyatt, Ralegh and Shakespeare in the 16th century, to Donne, Milton and Marvell in the 17th, to Swift, Pope and Johnson in the 18th. It embraces the Romantic visions of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, as well as the later, darker outlook of Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and seeks enlightenment in the shadowlands of Emily Dickinson, Wilde and Yeats. As well as journeying with the reader through some of the greatest poems in the English language, The Heavy Bear encounters many modern poets, not least Delmore Schwartz, whose sense of conflict between self and society gave birth to this anthology's title-poem, 'The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me'. Others include some of the major figures in Irish poetry Brendan Kennelly knew personally as well as wrote about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland. The poems keep each other company in this highly original compilation, questioning each other in a continuing thematic, imagistic debate which the editors seek to explore in their responses, trying at all times to define their sense and vision of poetry as disturbing, questioning, enlightening companionship for the reader. 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.

"When Then is Now" brings together Brendan Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies: Antigone by Sophocles and Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women. All three plays dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes. In his preface, Brendan Kennelly describes how writing these three plays helped him enormously at difficult times in his own life. "When Then is Now" gives living testament of his belief that 'listening to ancient voices can help us confront, understand and express many problems of today'.

This is a writer's journal of his friendships, encounters and observations during the 1950s and 60s, describing relationships with Cork author Frank O'Connor, Patrick Kavanagh, Charles Cape (onetime governor of Strangeways Prison) and the remarkable Margaret Radford, baglady and acquaintance of Shaw, Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, with her vivid experiences of the Great War. Peopled by the colourful characters met in his profession, Naughton also gives an intimate portrait of a marriage and the onset of death as he survives a coronary thrombosis. Limpid, candid and tellingly written, it delineates the struggles and triumphs of a migrant Irish writer living in the English provinces, with sharp insights into human behaviour.

Familiar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.

Brendan Kennelly's Guff is both mouthpiece and mouthed off, Devil's advocate and self critic, everyman and every writer consumed by self-doubt and self-questioning. The book of Guff is about words writing the man. Words drive him into the cave of himself where he questions everything including words that seem to constitute answers and answers that question both questions and answers. Do poets write poems or do poems write poets? And consider the shape of that question-mark, like a snake twisting in its sleep: so twisting, or twisted snakes, lie beside Guff as he tries to sleep in his cave, led now by the words that the snake hisses in his old head. All through his book-length poem Guff hears both the hissing of the words he believes he loves as well as the hissing mysteries of love. Guff is prey to the ruthless continuity of one word leading to another, until these words relax and settle down into what he thinks, or hopes, is "meaning". Like Kennelly's Cromwell, The Book of Judas and Poetry My Arse, Guff is a knockabout Swiftian satire, a mischievous meditation on the human condition. It's also a powerfully expressive hymn to life with all its flaws, a snaking poem with the movement of a river in its different moods from cold anger to summer warmth for minds and bodies, which asks who or what is a genuinely noble person? Dublin is the backdrop to Guff's jabbering quest, a city where haunted men walk the streets talking to themselves, at times with passion, at times with an air of secrecy or self-accusation, at times as if seeking a friend prepared to listen. Guff is a brother to these strange wanderers. In the poem he becomes at one or at odds with them.

Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca is a classic of Spanish literature, the tragedy of a woman loved by two men. The man she has loved since childhood is hot-blooded Leonardo, but his family are hated by her own folk, and he marries someone else. Then, on her wedding-night, Leonardo carries her off on horseback, pursued by the men of the two shamed families. The two rivals meet in the moonlight in a fight to the death... Lorca said the only hope for happiness lies in 'living one's instinctual life to the full'. And: 'To burn with desire and to remain silent is the greatest punishment we can inflict on ourselves.' Blood Wedding explores the tragic intensity of lived, instinctual passion. For Brendan Kennelly, this involves a return to the very origins of drama: 'The pure pulsing sense of the mysterious nature of life before we learn to explain things almost out of existence ... Blood Wedding is a drama of agonised and bewildering revelation.' Lorca has a searing realisation of the power of desire. Brendan Kennelly rises to the challenge of how to convey this in an English translation. In language at once soaring and accurate, wild and precise, he does justice to Lorca's tragic vision of the nature and consequences of lived desire. His version of Blood Wedding reveals the mysterious, intricate, passionate and truly astonishing nature of Lorca's masterpiece. Brendan Kennelly's versions of Euripides' The Trojan Women and Medea, and Sophocles' Antigone, are published by Bloodaxe Books in his drama trilogy When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies (2006). His version of Lorca's Blood Wedding was premiered by Northern Stage in Newcastle and Derby in autumn 1996. His Antigone and The Trojan Women were both first performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 1986 and 1993 respectively; Medea premiered in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1988, toured in England in 1989 and was broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

Buffun is wracked by the living nightmare of Irish history. His torments are surreal but no less frightening than the awful truth. When Oliver Cromwell turns up, the hapless buffoon can't cope. This Cromwell is a cocky tyrant who wants to run a football team, or start a taxi business. Enter the Belly, the IRA, an Irish giant, and Billy of the Boyne: 'William of Orange is polishing pianos / In convents and other delicate territories, / His nose purple from sipping turpentine.' Kennelly's Cromwell delighted and scandalised readers in Ireland when it was first published by a small Dublin press in 1983. This extraordinary, extravagantly Irish act of revenge has retained its power to shock.

The Book of Judas, Brendan Kennelly's 400-page epic poem in twelve parts, was the number one bestselling book in Ireland. The Little Book of Judas is a distillation of that literary monster, purged to its traitorous essence. But Judas never goes away. He continued to worm his way into Kennelly's imagination long after the original book was "finished", and The Little Book of Judas includes some damning new revelations from the eternal scapegoat and outcast. 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.

Much of Brendan Kennelly's poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of being in the world. The riddling poems of "Reservoir Voices" add a further dimension to these explorations, inspired by an autumn sojourn in America where he would sit by the edge of a reservoir, trying to cope with loneliness by contemplating black swans, blue waves, seagulls, trees and rocks: 'It was in that state of fascinated dislocation, of almost mesmerized emptiness, that the voices came with suggestions, images, memories, delights, horrors, rhythms, insights and calm, irrefutable insistence that it was they who were speaking, not me. To surrender to loneliness is to admit new presences, new voices into that abject emptiness. So I wrote down what I heard the voices say and, at moments, sing.'

Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) was one of Ireland's most popular and prolific poets. Over five decades he wrote thousands of poems published in over 30 books of poetry, including three previous editions of Selected Poems. Published on his 75th birthday, this new selection presents just over a hundred of Kennelly's most essential poems, accompanied by an audio CD of his own readings drawn from two classic recordings made in Dublin in 1982 and 1999. The Essential Brendan Kennelly has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and taught there for most of life. After studying at Trinity College, Michael Longley went on to become one of Ireland's leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10.

This is the first volume of its kind to present a collection of writings by and about Ireland's women. From Queen Maeve of Connaught to President Mary Robinson, this book presents Irish women as their compatriots-men and women both-have described and interpreted them. Modern Irish women are outspoken about the issues that rouse their passion-love and sex, marriage and divorce, abortion and adoption. As Katie Donovan says in her introduction: "Our selection is intended to give the reader a taste of the varied spectrum, from the courtly praise of men to swinish male chauvinism; from women's declarations of outrage against church and state to their celebrations of childbirth and motherhood." This book celebrates the vast range of women's thought and activity, their spirituality, and their passions. The women who appear in this collection are both well known and unknown, real and invented. The editors have drawn freely upon translations of the mythological tales and later Irish poems, upon letters, biographies, and newspapers as well as prose and poetry, plays, recordings and songs, in order to present a complex multilayered and richly rewarding view of Ireland's women.