it felt abit like they chose poems considered 'classics', with a purpose, rather than a more interesting and wide ranging selection. But of course it isn't that I don't like poetry per se (or even 'old' poetry -- I love Shakespeare's sonnets if not necessarily the ones picked out here), it's like I don't like this type of poetry. Whatever stage of understanding you have attained - whether you are growing up, standing still or growing down - you are surely going to be touched by this poem, if only for a moment, and attuned by it to the tears of things. It would be a school-book in the usual sense - the poems, for example, are grouped in ways that invite different kinds of historical and thematic reading but it would also resemble 'a school of poetry' gathered on traditional bardic lines, a memory bank, a compendium of examples. 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.

The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads

it also contains some poems that are pretty problematic wrt stereotypes and racism - these could easily have been omitted. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have selected familiar poems, obscure poems, poems from the oral tradition, and songs. He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life). This is not a slight to your proclivities -- nor is it, I might hasten to add, a slight on the sensibilities of the old white men that came before you and I. Here are my last thoughts on various lines that struck a chord and favorite poems from the last 100 pages or so. At the back of my mind this time there was something else written in the 1930s, in a book that was very different from the Auden and Garrett anthology.

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

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. What matters most in the end is the value that attaches to a few poems intimately experienced and well remembered. As a whole the scope needs tightening - this could be an excellent anthology of poems originally written in English; instead they’ve included a sprinkle of marvellous (razor-sharp and salty) poems in translation - Serbian, Chinese, Navajo.The first is the experience of enjoying poetry, feeling it intensely and getting to know many individual poems and kinds of poem. This, we hoped, would give the selection a feeling of lucky dip rather than prescribed text and would avoid the impression that the best readers always resist, the suspicion that the poems have, in Keats's words, "a palpable design" upon them. It can become the eye of a verbal needle through which the growing person can pass again and again until it is known by heart, and becomes a path between heart and mind, a path by which the individual can enter, repeatedly, into the kingdom of rightness.

The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry: 1 - AbeBooks

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. Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). These poems resonate in the same way any poem resonates, they are fun, they communicate a message and most importantly they occupy a time and space in which our world was free of expectation and responsibility. In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. For those with the gift, it is as if they have captured the essence of the room, excavated the emotion from the audience and let it out in a glorious breaching of the night air. In this second episode of the series, Michael tries to convince his family members to seek gainful employment.

The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads

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.Christopher Reid, then our editor at Faber, made wonderful suggestions about the internal grouping of the material. They and we operated in the faith that literary and cultural endeavour was conducted in a disinterested spirit. If the contract said we were doing The Faber Book of Verse for Younger People , the book in our heads was something closer to The Fancy Free Poetry Supplement . Moreover, the road we had travelled through English literature in our A-level years in the 1940s and 1950s was still the one being travelled by teenage students in the 1970s and 80s.