Preoccupations

Essays from the Nobel Prize winner that examine a poet’s relationship to their own voice, their literary heritage, and their contemporary world.

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father’s farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

“Collected lectures and reviews by the gifted Irish poet Seamus Heaney . . . dealing intimately with composition as an act of mind more profound than mere rhetoric, and showing how the circumstances of composition extend to the most urgent, painful historical questions.” ―Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review

“We should feel privileged when a poet admits us to his workshop, as Seamus Heaney seems to do in Preoccupations.” ―John Montague, The Guardian