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Seamus Heaney. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2002. x + 452 pages. $30. ISBN 0-374-15496-1
NOT ALL OF FINDERS KEEPERS IS NEW; in fact, the best of Heaney's prose was published much earlier in Preoccupations. It was there that he explained the genesis of his Irish bog poems, his most original work, which came straight from the farm life he knew as he was growing up in Derry, and about whose authenticity there could be no doubt. His work as a literary critic, however, which is most evident in this latest prose miscellany, leaves room for doubt. While his poetry tends to be modest and self-deprecating, his prose tends to be surprisingly ambitious. One wonders if his Nobel Prize, capped by the phenomenal success of his modernization of Beowulf, has persuaded him that he could remake the whole literary tradition as Pound and Eliot once did: Whereas his poetry has never...