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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’.

Author: Seamus Heaney