Ian Hickey & Eugene O’Brien 
Frontier of Writing 
A Study of Seamus Heaney s Prose

The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney s Prose is the first collection of essays solely focused on examining the Nobel prize winning poet s prose. The collection offers ten different perspectives on this body of work which vary from sustained thematic analyses on poetic form, the construction of identity, and poetry as redress, to a series of close readings of prose writing on poetic exemplars such as Robert Lowell, Patrick Kavanagh, W.B Yeats, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Brian Friel. Seamus Heaney s prose is extensive in its literary depth, knowledge, critical awareness and its span. During the course of his life, he published six collections of prose entitled Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968 1978, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, The Place of Writing, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures and Finders Keepers. Each of these texts is addressed in the collection alongside occasional and specific essays such as Crediting Poetry , Writer and Righter and Mossbawn via Mantua: Ireland in/and Europe, Cross-currents and Exchanges , among many others. This book is a comprehensive and timely study of Seamus Heaney s prose from leading international scholars in the field.