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'.
Review
“[Heaney's] approach to poetry--sensitive but tolerant, and attentive to beauty above all--suffuses Finders Keepers. It will delight those who have come to love Heaney's own rich and humane verse.” -Adam Kirsch, The Boston Globe
“A collection of Heaney's biographical reminiscences and frequently rhapsodic but meticulous critical essays. Heaney's is a lifelong romance with words.” -Christina Cho, The New York Times Book Review
“[Heaney's] critical prose can be as impassioned and as musical as the verse he's explicating...Heaney takes us to those places where we can find the genuine consolation that literature can provide.” -Charles Matthews, The Seattle Times
--This text refers to the
paperback edition.
Nobel laureate Heaney grew up in rural County Derry, in a place that he evocatively describes as "in between," the borderlands of Northern Ireland, within which one invisibly passes from Catholic nationalist to Protestant loyalist terrain. This is a land Heaney describes as a proper natal site for any poet, for poets are born to endlessly traverse the spaces between sound and sense. This collection, however, gathers Heaney's occasional prose from four decades, much of it meditating upon other poets who have moved him, including familiar members of the canon, such as Eliot and Yeats and Auden, and lesser-known and newer moderns, such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Thomas Kinsella, and Norman MacCaig, whose work draws his interest. Not surprisingly for a poet from a war-wracked land, Heaney comes back again and again to the question of how poetry can matter against human savagery. Again and again, he concludes that beauty and the meaning it gives to life must matter. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.com Review
In addition to his well-regarded verse, Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney has amassed a body of prose works over the last 30-plus years, previously published chiefly in three separate books.
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, offers a "best of" (of sorts) as Heaney sifts through previous writings and offers a variety of strong works, from memoir to lecture transcripts to literary criticism.
Long regarded as one of Northern Ireland's premier contemporary poets, this volume shows us that Heaney has a sharp critical eye as well, giving us probing analyses of his literary mentors (such as William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and W.B. Yeats), European poets (Edwin Muir, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes to name but a few), and other prominent European and American poets (T.S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Sylvia Plath). Additionally, Heaney includes pieces on the writing process and his evolution as a writer that are insightful and engaging. In "Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland," Heaney describes what the poet sets out to achieve:In that liberated moment when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments.
Whether you're a fan of Heaney's poems or not, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 is an excellent critical resource--one into which it is well worth digging. --Michael Ferch
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include
Opened Ground,
Electric Light,
Beowulf,
The Spirit Level,
District and Circle, and
Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats." --This text refers to the
paperback edition.
Book Description
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971 - 2001 gathers Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney's essays and lectures from across three decades, selecting from volumes including Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry. --This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
+91 9818282497
