Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001

seamus heaney

A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry, a celebration of the "tenacious curiosity" (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel laureate

Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney's "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."

Genres poetryessaysnonfictionirelandphilosophyliterary criticismcriticismliteratureschool

452 pages, Paperback

First published June 26,2002

Literary awards

truman capote award for literary criticism,

This edition

Format: 452 pages, Paperback
Published: April 16, 2003 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374528782
ASIN: 0374528780
Language: English

About the author

seamus heaney

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.