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 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".