Finders Keepers

Whether 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 be to his own voice his own place his literary heritage and the contemporary world?Along with a selection from the poet''s three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry) the present volume includes Heaney''s finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British American and Eastern European predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is as its title indicates an announcement of both excitement and possession.