Adrian Rice
Adrian Rice is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the University of Ulster with a BA in English & Politics, and an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature. He has delivered writing workshops, readings, and lectures throughout Europe and the United States. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Mason’s Tongue, which was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, and nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry. Adrian now lives with his wife and young son in Hickory, North Carolina. He is a Lecturer, First Year Seminar, at Appalachian State University, where he is also working to complete his Doctoral studies.
ISBN 978-1-941209-81-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-941209-84-4 (hardcover)
9 x 6 softcover, 244 pages
Advice to a Young Poet
If you’ve any
ambition,
lose it early.
For what’s
ambition worth,
if you’re here
to tell the truth?
Praise for Adrian Rice
"Adrian Rice has a nice sense of what he is up to as a poet: I like and admire the way his district and his diction are so artfully tongue-in-cheek and hand-in-glove."
—Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature
“Deft, exact, laconic, The Mason’s Tongue is a collection to be savoured.”
—Tom Paulin, author of New Selected Poems
“[Hickory Haiku is] a jewel of a book. The book has a beautiful intensity, beautifully controlled by form and intellectual and emotional precision.”
—Brendan Kennelly, author of The Essential Brendan Kennelly: Selected Poems
“Rice’s voice is distinctively his own: forthright, colloquial, wry and persuasive.”
—Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement
“Rice uses silence like a painter uses negative space, reminding us that no matter where we go, we enter the new country with the old one still strapped on our back."
—Keith Flynn, author of Colony Collapse Disorder and editor of Asheville Poetry Review
“Hickory Station is a warm-hearted, beautifully crafted, tour de force.”
—Jefferson Holdridge, author of The Poetry of Paul Muldoon
“ The Strange Estate is a rich cache of poetry, a rare word-horde if ever there was one. From the ‘breathless sounding/Of the worm’s earth-dark’ in Muck Island , through the finely-wrought music of ‘The Moongate Sonnets’, to a quiet voice, on ‘The Shadowed Path’, that makes the shadows real, Adrian Rice offers poetry that tunes the ear, and awakens mind and heart to share in his unflinching and compassionate attention to the weave of world and words in which we all live. You go back from these poems into your own life alert and alive to so much that you might otherwise have missed.”
—Malcolm Guite, author of Mariner: A voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge