The strengths and limitations of poet-critics, as a class, seem to come from intensity of focus: They need to think about writing, about poetic composition. And any insight or idea in their criticism grows somehow from the complex, subterranean roots of concern with composition, and with the circumstances of composition. These collected lectures and reviews ["Preoccupations"] by the gifted Irish poet Seamus Heaney often explore those roots in exciting ways, 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.

The moments of such penetration come primarily, I find, when Mr. Heaney meditates on his personal and national past—Irish speech, landscape, history, poetry, and hereditary blood-struggles—touching and testing the links between them. The most moving piece in the book, the lecture "Feeling Into Words," confirms the idea that Mr. Heaney's vitality and seriousness rely in large measure upon a particular soil and its past….

As a prose writer, Mr. Heaney has a nimble, elegant charm and the ability to rise suddenly, at his best, from conventional ideas to home truths. He manages to keep a little of the charm of thought even in the journeyman reviews included in "Preoccupations."…

On the subject of poets close to him—Wordsworth, Hopkins, Mandelstam, Lowell, his own opposed tutelary geniuses Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh—Mr. Heaney writes with authority, persuasive intensity and learning. His ability to go into the texture of poetic language and figures of sound, and his speculations about the way a life and times inform a life's work, remind one that there is a taste to be satisfied by literary criticism….

If any mannerisms mar the book here and there, the offending ones to my taste would be the tones of the literary journalist, not the university instructor. In the service of a convenient orotundity, for instance, he sprinkles little allusive tags into his sentences now and then with an effect I find mechanical….

Such coasting makes the moments when Mr. Heaney's underlying alertness and seriousness come all the way into the foreground that much more stirring by contrast. If the solemn tag lines indicate that he is allowing himself an easy moment, comic charm can sometimes indicate that he is about to deal with crucial matters.