Finders Keepers

A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry a celebration of the tenacious curiosity (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel laureateWhether autobiographical topical or specifically literary these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney''s career: How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice his own place his literary heritage and the contemporary world?Along with a selection from Heaney''s three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry) the present volume includes a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in books ranging from formal lectures to radio commentaries about the rural Ireland of his childhood to illuminating reviews of his contemporaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets—Irish and British American and Eastern European predecessors fellows and successors—Finders Keepers becomes as its title heralds an announcement of both excitement and possession.