The first six pieces in [Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978], all quite short, form an untitled section on their own, though three are headed "Mossbawn" and three "Belfast". They are all, in the best sense, self-centred—informal circumstantial sketches of [Heaney's] upbringing in Co Derry, his childhood reading and absorption of "rhymes", his literary apprenticeship as an undergraduate at Queen's …, and a laconic Christmas 1971 message from the battlefront….

One of Heaney's considerable gifts in these prose pieces is that he keeps a proper—and not mock-modest—commonsensical balance, whether he is talking about himself or other poets….

The refinement and extension of Heaney's art, which reached its striven-for level in North …, goes hand-in-glove with his strong but delicate handling of other men's flowers. In Preoccupations, lectures and reviews show a generosity of spirit, and an acuteness of mind, which can see the best in such different recent poets as Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, Theodore Roethke, Hugh MacDiarmid, Stevie Smith, Robert Lowell; among the Irish, Patrick Kavanagh, John Hewitt, John Montague, Paul Muldoon—as well as, presidingly and almost forbiddingly, Yeats; which can find as much nourishment, unobviously, in Wordsworth as in, obviously, Hopkins. In all these plumbings in prose, what is felt for is the nerve of the rhythm, the energy of the word, which, together, reach what Eliot … called "the auditory imagination"….

Although, on the face of it, many of the preoccupations of Heaney's prose may seem to be personal and/or Irish (and perhaps there is no need for the "and/or"), the most impressive single piece in the book is a long lecture called "Englands of the Mind", which takes three poets who "treat England as a region—or rather treat their region as England—in different and complementary ways": Hughes, Hill, and Larl in. Heaney's sensitive and sympathetic discussion of these three concentrates on their speech, their special language, in a way that has eluded most of their explicators and standardbearers…. What Heaney establishes is the way in which "their three separate voices are guaranteed by three separate foundations which, when combined, represent almost the total resources of the English language itself", and how these draw on distinct landscapes…. This essay is an altogether masterly analysis, precise in its convictions, of a kind that only a poet could achieve and only a specially gifted poet could communicate so effortlessly and scrupulously….

Taken together (and taking the unrepresented Field Work into account too),… Selected Poems and Preoccupations show Heaney as all of a piece, a man in whom technique and craft (he makes his distinction between them in "Feelings into Words") have made a happy marriage. If he was overpraised for his early poems, as I think he was, he is now in danger of being cut down to size by those repelled by the lumbering tread of the symbolic exegetes and the over-attention of the elephantine misreaders. But he seems to me a man who knows his own mind and will not easily be deflected.