It features reprints from earlier Heaney collections, and several works previously published in newspapers, as lectures, or contributions to books.

Further linking Finders Keepers with Preoccupations, he quotes in the preface:[3] The essays selected here are held together by searches for answers to central preoccupying questions: how should a poet properly live and write?

[1] Rachel Buxton for The Cambridge Quarterly said in her review the book is "to be cherished" as a means to reassess Heaney's past poetic criticism.

[4] Writing for the Harvard Review, Thomas O'Grady described the book as a "compelling complement" to Heaney's poetic work.

[5] William Pratt, writing for World Literature Today, found the book ambitious but inconsistent in its poetic criticism and "mean-spirited" in its tone.