As the title indicates, this book examines the attitude to place and home that is enunciated in the work of Seamus Heaney, as well as looking at the place or role of his writing within notions of the political. Given the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the contextual background of much of Heaney’s writing, this book examines the relationships between Heaney’s texts and this context. I will argue that, far from accepting the cultural and religious ‘givens’ of his heritage, Heaney’s writing sets out a more inclusive notion of identity, which is ethical, in the sense used by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. He is constantly probing the nature of selfhood and of self-identity as well as the relationship between that selfhood and different forms of otherness, and his work sets up a dialectical interaction between these positions that is ultimately transformative. His work as viewed as driven by the desire to create a space where notions of Irishness are pluralized and opened to different influences, and which is predicated on the ‘an erotics of the future’) where ‘whatever is given / can always be reimagined’. This is the first thematic study of Heaney’s work in terms of its creation of a politics of identity, as well as being the first to discuss his critique of notions of home and place, both terms that are important in Irish literature and politics. It is the most contemporary study to date, dealing with all aspects of his writing – poetry, prose and translations – up to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict. It also examines Heaney’s engagement with the issue of Ireland as a postcolonial society. The book examines Heaney as a cultural thinker, whose work combines the aesthetic and the political, using one mode to critique the other. It is the first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, suggesting parallels between the writing of Heaney and Derrida. It offers a reading of his most famous book, North, which takes issue with David Lloyd’s now canonical reading of Heaney, by seeing the book as opening a dialogue with other traditions.