This is a gathering together of Seamus Heaney's marvellous critical prose. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these pieces circle his 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 to his contemporary world?' There are essays from three previous collections of prose and from 'The Place of Writing', a series of Lectures delivered in 1988 at Emory University. Also included are several 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 'Keeping the Accent' a lecture delivered in May, 2001 to the first meeting of Scottish-Irish Research Centre in Trinity College, Dublin.