Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971 – 2001

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney''s prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: 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?

As well as being 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 material from ''The Place of Writing'', a series of lectures delivered at Emory University in 1988. Also included are a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books. In its soundings of a wide range of poets - Irish and British, American and East European, predecessors and contemporaries - Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, ''an announcement of both excitement and possession''.