Love after Love
The time will comewhen, with elation,you will greet yourself arrivingat your own door, in your own mirrorand each will smile at the other's welcome,and say, sit here. Eat.You will love again the stranger who was your self.Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heartto itself, to the stranger who has loved youall your life, whom you ignoredfor another, who knows you by heart.Take down the love letters from the bookshelfthe photographs, the desperate notes,peel your own image from the mirror.Sit. Feast on your life.
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- November 3, 2022
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“Love after Love” from THE HEAVY BEAR WHO GOES WITH ME: 100 CLASSIC POEMS WITH COMMENTARY.
Published by Bloodaxe Books on Apr 17 2022.
(“Love after Love” Originally from COLLECTED POEMS 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott.
Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott.
Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia. He was not only the foremost Caribbean poet of modern times (as well as a dramatist and painter) but a major figure in world literature. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place. His later collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”
Hexham, Northumberland
England
"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)
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