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Striking a balance between the familiar and (to a presumed reader) the new must be one of the major challenges for the editors of an anthology of poetry. In The Rattle Bag, Heaney and Hughes succeed in this endeavour brilliantly. Although I consider myself fairly well-read, I estimate that I already knew only about one tenth of the poems collected here, so there were new discoveries to be made on almost every page. Not all of them, naturally, were to my taste - with eleven poems here, it is clear that the editors like Yeats, whom I do not care for - and some served to confirm rather than overturn my existing biases: on the evidence here, it turns out that D.H. Lawrence (fourteen) had one good poem in him, which I had already read, with the rest of his verse being as dreary as his fiction, and barely distinguisable from prose. In fact, I've emerged from my reading of The Rattle Bag with a growing antipathy to free verse: if you haven't got formal metrical structures, and you haven't got rhyme, what are you left with? But I've also learned that I have underestimated Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and John Clare, and that The Prelude might actually be something I have to tackle one day. John Crowe Ransom was one new name to be whose work I'd like to read more of and Ogden Nash looks fun.

As well as the content, the organization of this anthology is outstanding, with the alphabetical ordering of the poems throwing up endless fascinating juxtapositions. No doubt these are not merely serendipitous, and the editors do cheat at one point, following Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd" with Raleigh's and Donne's reponses to it (Donne's only entry here: curious!). There's an interesting focus on ballads and other anonymous verse; but, with a few exceptions, I was less convinced by the rather haphazard selection of verse in translation. Both a strength and a weakness of this book is its lack of scholarly apparatus (bar a glossary) and absence of notes, which forces the reader's attention onto content rather than context, but makes follow-up reading difficult: it took me a lot of digging elsewhere to discover that the Jonson poem given here as "It is not growing like a tree" is in fact an extract from a much longer piece. But these are minor criticisms of what is in the end, a wonderfully rich and rewarding book.