Poetry is a balm. In these disturbing days, I find myself reaching for its salve more and more.
One book often in my hands I've had for decades—it's green and tattered, relentlessly dogeared. Called The Rattle Bag (a rattlebag is a collection of small objects, ideas, songs, etc.), it was first published in 1982, and is a collection of the favorite poems of the poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. This eclectic and idiosyncratic and endlessly charming mixture ranges from doggerel and songs to Shakespeare and beyond. A lot of well-known and many lesser-known poets appear. “Anon.” is well-represented.
In an article years ago, Heaney said that The Rattle Bag was "intended as an intervention....compiled in the conviction that poetry can be regarded as an ad hoc enrichment available to all comers at all stages of their lives." Heaney remarked that he and Hughes were looking for a combination of "rareness, seriousness, and unexpectedness" in the variety of poems.
And luckily for us, The Rattle Bag is still available (although the cover is no longer green). Yes, pretty steep at $30 for a new paperback, but the book contains hundreds of poems and many surprises, and can last for decades. The Rattle Bag is a book full of rhyme and reason and, well, joy.
And who doesn't need that?
Carin Pratt is one of the remarkably knowledgeable crew at the Norwich Bookstore—and an ardent recommender of books. Before she landed in these parts, she spent 27 years at CBS News, including two decades as the executive producer of Face the Nation.