The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry: 1

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When my wife and I lived in Belfast in the late 1960s, our neighbours were an elderly couple called Wilson. In those days we had two toddlers in the house and they used to spend as much time with the Wilsons as they did at home. And one of the things Mrs Wilson used to repeat to the elder of them offers a good way into this discussion. "Michael," she would tell him, "you and Christopher are growing up, Granda Wilson and I are growing down, and your daddy and mammy are standing still." There’s also a heavy emphasis on nature - no surprise when Heaney and Hughes are involved - though far too much cloying William Blake and tepid Robert Frost for my taste (and unfair on the other poets who don’t get such preferential treatment). The method employed in arranging and presenting [the contents of this book] must surely be the one for all the best anthologies . . . The Rattle Bag sets a standard which other anthologies will find it difficult to equal."— Alan Brownjohn, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads

the collection contains a few poems translated into English from Irish, Welsh, Swedish, (as far as I read), but still feels very limited. Need more inclusive short stories? Here are some for Hispanic Heritage Month, AAPI authored, and LGBTQ+ authored. I also share short story assessment ideas too! “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu (HS) urn:lcp:isbn_9780571119769:epub:35e8a06f-4531-4df4-961e-431e5f8418ac Extramarc Brown University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isbn_9780571119769 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t15m7b27w Isbn 057111976X Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter.Sure, “Gift of the Magi” and “The Lottery” are classics for teaching irony, but they offer little in the way of inclusive representation. There is nothing wrong with these stories, but we can serve our students better by including a wider selection of voices and identities. I’m not asking you to stop teaching “The Lottery” or “Gift of the Magi”, but encouraging you to add some more inclusive short stories and supporting materials to your curriculum. Are you looking to revitalize your short story unit? Are your students just not getting irony? I’m here to help! Here are 5 fresh texts for teaching irony with short stories.

The Rattle Bag an Anthology of Poetry by Heaney - AbeBooks The Rattle Bag an Anthology of Poetry by Heaney - AbeBooks

A very interesting and different collection of poetry, chosen by two of our most famous modern poets. Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and conceived of as a collection of their own favourite poems, The Rattle Bag has established itself as the classic anthology of our time. Heaney and Hughes have brought together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures. In effect, this anthology has transformed the way we define and appreciate poetry, and it will continue to do so for years to come. Faber & Faber was founded nearly a century ago, in 1929. Read about our long publishing history in a decade-by-decade account. I can't help but wonder if all the poems by Anon were by women unable to be published...just a thought.Including writers from Shakespeare and Blake to Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, The Rattle Bag is eclectic, instructive and inspiring at the same time.

Bags of enlightenment | Books | The Guardian Seamus Heaney: Bags of enlightenment | Books | The Guardian

And here's another with the same kind of mature, naif, off-centre centrality of vision that we favoured, a translation of a poem called "The Earthworm" by 20th-century Swedish poet Harry Martinson: Which brings me, in conclusion, to the kit bag - which might have been the title of The School Bag . In the end, we were swayed to the school bag because the kit bag had such a strong association with military action and suggested the solidarity of massed ranks rather than the sympathies of a well-schooled and many-minded individual. It conveyed an impression of positive certitude and imperial destiny rather than negative capability and common humanity. In our time, after all, a post-colonial time, in a world of multi-ethnic populations, the image of the marching man in khaki uniform, with his gun and his gear, is more of a menace than a promise. The Rattle Bag, containing the favourite poems of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, is a well-loved poetry anthology essential for the student and the expert alike. Arranging the poems alphabetically by first line results in some lovely serendipities - strange and refreshing pairings which might have been missed if they’d gone for a thematic or chronological structure. I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but this delightfully creepy story will turn the readers’ expectations on their heads. The ending provides an outstanding example of situational irony. And as I noted, you could use this story with middle schoolers or high schoolers. It’s chilling, but not gory or graphic.Plus, since the new remake just dropped on Disney+, now is the perfect time to introduce our students to the classic version that we grew up with. In the end, the volume was too abundant, too frolicsome and too unruly to go by the rather headmasterly title in the contract, so all of a sudden Ted suggested we call it by the name of a strange roguish poem translated from the Welsh of Dafydd ap Gwilym. It's about an instrument that sounds more like an implement, a raucous, distracting, shake, rattle-and-roll affair that disturbs the poet and his lover while they lie together in the greenwood. In the words of the translator, Joseph Clancy, it becomes a noisy pouch perched on a pole, a bell of pebbles and gravel, "a blare, a bloody nuisance". We were wanting to serve notice that the anthology was a wake-up call, an attempt to bring poetry and younger people to their senses. And we wanted to do so for precisely those ends I outlined at the beginning. For the present delight of younger people. For the future nurture of mature people. For the now of perception. For the then of recollection. We intended the same material to prove equally rewarding for the one growing up, the one "standing still" - and, if all went well, for the one "growing down". There was, however, something official-sounding about the book that was named on our first Faber contract. We had agreed to compile a volume called The Faber Book of Verse for Younger People - a title that seems to carry some sort of educational health warning - but once we got going, we discovered that enjoyment rather than improvement would be our first criterion. Our advice to ourselves was to look for things that we'd have liked to have been introduced to early on. And for that reason much familiar canonical work was not included, since we took it for granted that our putative audience would also have had a chance to know it already. No Shakespeare sonnet appeared, for example; no George Herbert; no Milton; no Tennyson. Immediately following this we printed Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach", a work from the other end of the age of religion, when all the poet can hear is the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the sea of faith that Adze-head and his brothers had once furled around earth's shores like a bright garment. And immediately following Arnold, we printed Elizabeth Bishop's great invocation to the sea and its waters, her poem called "At the Fishhouses", a poem in which one witnesses the rebirth of a religious impulse in a post-religious sensibility. "I have seen it over and over," Bishop writes, "the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, / icily free above the stones . . . as if the water were a transmutation of fire / That feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame." And the poem ends: