''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 of 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 preiously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books. 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''.