Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001

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 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."

"A brimming metaphoric energy . . a buoyant vivacity of description . . . reflective humor . . . and an imaginative penetration . . . unequalled in contemporary critical prose." —Helen Vendler, The New Yorker

"[Heaney's] approach to poetry—sensitive but tolerant, and attentive to beauty above all—suffuses Finders Keepers. It will delight those who have come to love Heaney's own rich and humane verse." ―Adam Kirsch, The Boston Globe

"Heaney takes us to those places where we can find the genuine consolation that literature can provide." ―Charles Matthews, The Seattle Times