Seamus Heaney - Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001

Seamus Heaney - Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). 452 pages.

Improved version of an older scan. Searchable pdf (clearscan) with contents in bookmarks, accurate pagination and metadata, etc. Many thanks to the original scanner.

description:

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 career: “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.”

From Publishers Weekly

Ireland's most recent Nobel laureate offers up many old, and some new, critical and autobiographical essays in this invitingly capacious volume, which reprints most of his previous books of prose, from Preoccupations (1980) to the Oxford lectures in The Redress of Poetry (1995). The book, like its title, both "expresses glee and stakes a claim," as Heaney remarks. Subjects of glee (or appreciation, anyway) include several major (and some minor) poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Clare, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, all examined in the literary criticism that makes up the second and longest of the book's three parts. Heaney as critic both offers insight into the makings of others' verse and shows how his readings of others' poetry (such as Clare's and Kavanagh's) have informed the making of his own. More general pieces examine, for example, "The Irish Poet in Britain" and the place of poets in the classroom. Part three collects recent book reviews and short magazine pieces, among them Heaney's memorial to Joseph Brodsky and his famous division of Paul Muldoon's oeuvre into "muldoodles" and "mulboons." Of equal or broader interest are the personal reflections in the volume's first section, which moves from the "secret nests" of Heaney's childhood to Belfast in the 1960s and the Irish peace process of the 1990s. Evocative, bedazzling and fruitful in its implications, Heaney's prose has become a necessary complement to his poetry.