Book description
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,
including 'Place and Displacement' (1984), only available previously
as a pamphlet, and 'Burns's Art Speech', written for the bicentennial
of Robert Burns's death. 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'.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of
a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since
then he has published poetry, criticism and translations - including
Beowulf (1999) - which have established him as one of the leading poets
now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
District and Circle (2006) was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006.
Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll,
appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for
Literature.
