Heaney from the heart

One might be forgiven for thinking that the publication of a Nobel Laureate's selected prose is just another honorary gesture, another step on the path to public statuary. Seamus Heaney's Finders Keepers is no such thing, or rather it's much more than just that. The poet and translator's essays of 30 years form an invaluable commentary on reading, writing, voice and place in the last century, and go far beyond being "just another accomplished print-out of a cultivated man's impressions", to borrow Heaney's own words about Zbigniew Herbert.

Heaney is never going to be a distant figurehead, grand oldmannish sort of writer. He writes from the heart, swayed and buoyed by his excitement at other people's work; a great writer is, after all, the best reader anyone could hope for. Eliot and Yeats are the towering presences here, but he also keeps coming back to Elizabeth Bishop, to Larkin, Mandelstam, Herbert, Milosz, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and there are lengthy, searching appreciations of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and WH Auden. John Clare's Prog is one of many pieces which convey Heaney's delight in other people's suppleness and expertise; he takes us through Clare's poem The Mouse's Nest fairly gloating and crowing over the choice of words, the poet's "spontaneous at-homeness in speech itself ". Not that pleasure ever blinds Heaney: he is an astute critic, sometimes making leaps of intellect that are breathtaking and always expressing himself in the most beautiful vocabulary; wide, apt and never ornate.

The few bits of autobiography in this collection make one long for Heaney to do the thing at length, even though so much of his life story is in his poems. He has a wonderful description of being taught TS Eliot's poetry at his Catholic boarding school in Derry, with a teacher who chanted through "the HOLLOW men, the STUFFED men": "And needless to say, in a class of 30 boys, in an atmosphere of socks and sex and sniggers, stuffed men and prickly pears and bangs and whimpers did not elevate the mood." His recollections of farm life in Derry are headily sensual: "I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse's collar."

This personalising touch lightens the whole collection, even the short section of reviews at the end, which includes a vibrant obituary of his friend Joseph Brodsky: "he burned not with the hard, gemlike flame that Walter Pater proposed as an ideal, but rather with a kind of flame-thrower's whoosh and reach, supple and unpredictable, at once a flourish and a menace."

Heaney's wit is everywhere, from his description of the older Eliot as "a vestryman" and the end of Larkin's Wedding Wind as "a kind of biblical swoon" to his concurrent defence and debunking of Yeats's eccentricities in Yeats as an Example? On almost every page he has something bold and heartfelt to say, like this about Burns in a great essay on the vernacular:

"The potency of his songs is in itself enough to prove how surely he could find his way into a sort of original knowledge, but that feeling of broaching the race's survival-truths is present everywhere." It is a pity there's no index in a book which readers will want to go back to time and again, an educational, inspirational and at times extremely moving book. How fitting it was that Heaney's prize was awarded for Literature, not just his own poetry.