Tuesday Book Club: The Rattle Bag – A Poetry Collection to Keep Close

This week’s Tuesday Book Club pick might be a little different. It’s not a novel, not a memoir, but a poetry anthology. The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, isn’t just any collection though. It’s a book I first came across as a young man, and it hit me with such force and delight that I ended up carrying it around with me for months, appropriately enough, in my bag.

I dipped in and out of it constantly. I read and re-read the poems, and something about the way it had been put together—the sequencing, the unexpected juxtapositions, the mix of the famous and the unfamiliar—taught me as much about reading as it did about writing.

What is The Rattle Bag?

First published in 1982, The Rattle Bag is a poetry anthology compiled by two of the 20th century’s greatest poets: Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. But it’s not a “greatest hits” or a dry academic selection. It’s a personal, playful, and occasionally surprising gathering of poems, arranged alphabetically by title, so that a Shakespeare sonnet might sit next to a haiku, or a folk rhyme might bump up against a T.S. Eliot fragment.

The result is a book that invites wandering. There’s no pressure to read cover to cover. You just open it wherever you like and find something that catches the light in a different way.

Why it still matters

As anthologies go, this one feels unusually alive. There’s joy in it, and mischief too. It’s a celebration of language and rhythm, and of all the strange, rich voices that can exist between two covers.

For me, it was a companion. Not just a book I read, but one I lived with for a good long while. It opened doors, to poets I hadn’t read before, to forms I hadn’t known I loved, to ways of thinking about words I hadn’t imagined. And it invites you to dwell and to contemplate—important characteristics in these hectic times.

Let’s talk about it

Do you remember the first poetry collection that truly grabbed you? Was it something from school, something gifted, something you discovered by chance? Or maybe you’re still waiting to find the right one.

Join us this week under #TuesdayBookClub and #TheRattleBag to share your favourite poems, lines, or moments from this anthology, or others that have meant something to you, on X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky.