“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