These 450 pages of Q&A are less an interrogation, more a gentlemanly picking of brains. O'Driscoll, a fellow Irish poet, posed questions from the philosophical ("What has poetry taught you?") to the prosaic ("Where was the flax-dam positioned in relation to the family house?"); Heaney replied, we're told, in writing, selectively and in an order of his choosing. That said, his responses don't suggest conceit; now 70, Heaney comes across as generous, as eloquent as ever, deeply thoughtful and proud yet faintly embarrassed by his deification. As the art of poetry takes precedence over biography, more thorough quoting from Heaney's verse would have been nice.