Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001

seamus heaney

"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 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 of 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 preiously 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".

Genres poetryessaysnonfictionirelandphilosophyliterary criticismcriticismliteratureschool

432 pages, Paperback

First published June 26,2002

Literary awards

truman capote award for literary criticism,

This edition

Format: 432 pages, Paperback
Published: April 7, 2003 by Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571210916
ASIN: 0571210910
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.