Stepping Stones: Interviews With Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Dennis O’Driscoll

Irish poet Seamus Heaney never bothered with an autobiography, but this collection of interviews with critic Dennis O'Driscoll fills the breach. In Stepping Stones the Nobel Prize winner discusses his poetry, his translations and teachings, and the people and circumstances shaping his life as a Roman Catholic growing up in Protestant-dominated Ulster. His memories are vivid and have already helped build some of his best-loved poems. A farmer's son with a university scholarship, Heaney combined the expression of everyday experience with classical erudition. He comes across as thoughtful, an engaging conversationalist concerned with maintaining ethics in the arts and slowing the decline of language into advertorial gibberish. "The world is reduced by the reduced power of speech in somebody like George W. Bush," he says. O'Driscoll never asks his opinion of Barack Obama.