Finders Keepers Selected Prose 1971-2001

by Heaney, Seamus

• ISBN13: 9780374528782
• ISBN10: 0374528780
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-16
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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,andThe 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 Keepersbecomes, as its title heralds, "an announcement of both excitement and possession." Seamus Heaneyreceived the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His many books of poetry includeOpened Ground,Electric Light,The Spirit Level,Seeing Things,Station Island,The Haw Lantern, andField Work, as well as translations ofBeowulfandDiary of One Who Vanished. A resident of Dublin, he has taught poetry at Oxford University and Harvard University. In 2004, Heaney was presented with theKenyon ReviewAward for Literary Achievement. Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism Finders Keeperscollects Seamus Heaney's best prose of the last three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the preoccupying questions of Heaney's long and important career: "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?" Along with a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations,The Government of the Tongue, andThe Redress of Poetry), this volume includes Heaney's finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in book form, from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its clear and challenging soundings on a wide range of poets and poetics--Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries--Finders Keepersis, as its title heralds, "an announcement of both excitement and possession." "Heaney is one of the great living poets . . . and as this new selection of his essays and lectures shows, he has written often and beautifully about poets, poems, and poetry in general . . . [Finders Keepers] will delight those who have come to love Heaney's own rich and humane verse."--Adam Kirsch,The Boston Globe "[Heaney's essays exhibit] a brimming metaphoric energy [and] a buoyant vivacity of description . . . reflective humor . . . and imaginative penetration [that are] unequalled in contemporary critical prose."--Helen Vendler,The New Yorker "Heaney gives us appreciations of poets ranging from Robert Burns to Sylvia Plath, as well as autobiographical pieces that suggest the tension between 'Place and Displacement'--to borrow the title of his essay on recent poetry from Northern Ireland--that characterizes Heaney's own poetry . . . To read poems with Heaney, whose critical prose can be as impassioned and musical as the verse he's explicating, is to confront what they can do. 'None of us wants fake consolation in the face of real problems,' he says. 'None of us wants Disney

Author Biography

Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His most recent volume of poems is Electric Light (FSG, 2001). A resident of Dublin since 1976, he teaches regularly at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
I
Mossbawn	3	(12)
from Feeling into Words	15	(13)
Learning from Eliot	28	(14)
Belfast	42	(6)
Cessation 1994	48	(3)
Something to Write Home About	51	(12)
Earning a Rhyme	63	(8)
On Poetry and Professing	71	(10)
II
Englands of the Mind	81	(22)
Yeats as an Example?	103	(19)
Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland	122	(24)
The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh	146	(12)
The Main of Light	158	(9)
Atlas of Civilization	167	(17)
from Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet	184	(13)
from The Government of the Tongue	197	(12)
from Sounding Auden	209	(11)
Lowell's Command	220	(18)
from The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath	238	(15)
The Place of Writing	253	(16)
On W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee	253	(9)
On Thomas Kinsella	262	(7)
Edwin Muir	269	(12)
from The Redress of Poetry	281	(5)
from Extending the Alphabet: Christopher Marlowe	286	(14)
John Clare's Prog	300	(19)
A Torchlight Procession of One: Hugh MacDiarmid	319	(20)
from Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas	339	(4)
Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin	343	(18)
from Counting to a Hundred: Elizabeth Bishop	361	(17)
Burns's Art Speech	378	(18)
Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain	396	(23)
III
Stevie Smith's Collected Poems	419	(3)
Joyce's Poetry	422	(3)
Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar	425	(4)
Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile	429	(4)
Norman MacCaig, 1910--1996	433	(4)
Joseph Brodsky, 1940--1996	437	(4)
On Ted Hughes's 'Littleblood'	441	(3)
Secular and Millennial Milosz	444	(7)
Acknowledgements	451