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 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, and The Redress of Poetry), the present volume includes Heaney's finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets, Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries.
"A brimming metaphoric energy . . a buoyant vivacity of description . . . reflective humor . . . and an imaginative penetration . . . unequalled in contemporary critical prose."
Helen Vendler, The New Yorker
"Seamus Heaney's best prose of the last three decades -- work "as life-enhancing . . . as the poems it celebrates."
