Praise for Adrian Rice and The Chances of Harm

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

Every new Adrian Rice book razes what I think I know. It happened again. Though he’s never slow to address the elephant in the room, this latest volume wrestles mammoths. This is poetry boldly of its own time, out for its evening walk, but on no idle dander. Grim and glad epiphanies arise. The big boys—mortality, reactionary populism—are confronted, but littler concerns, the free things, are given their rightful place upfront. From Rathcoole to the Carolinian suburbs, on out to Walmart, in this latest verse furrow—ploughed solo, as ever, and unswervingly—we witness an utter údar at work. Formally exacting, frank, tender and current, The Chances of Harm cuts deep, gives cheek and keeps it real.

—Scott McKendry, author of Gub

“In an effort to stay grounded, I start each day / with the live download from NASA TV ...” (“Vertigo”). That’s just one example of the wry humour with which Rice looks at himself and everyday life in this warm-hearted, sharp-sighted collection. There’s a frequent sense of pleased, attentive surprise, as if the Irish poet were still seeing his “newfound America” for the first time. He’s particularly alert to the local bird species, from the hawk and scary owl of the title poem to the agile ventriloquist Mimus Polyglottos—“the many-tongued thrush”, and the “nippy cardinals / and their feisty wives”. Bird behaviour, for Rice, inevitably mirrors human behaviour—the latter a bizarre circus, viewed, directly or indirectly, by an affectionate but undeceived realist. Consumerism is satirised, and environmental destruction challenged, as when the poet notices places where “there’s always someone building ... / the land never being allowed to breathe”. The collection itself is a demonstration of poetic breathing-space. It interlaces numerous spare, focused lyrics with occasional longer narratives—poems like the deeply thoughtful and moving “The Silent Space”, in which a father watches his son’s reactions (and notes his own) during the child’s extensive audiological investigation. The most generous and un-self-centred of poets, Rice seems to share his new home with his readers, his voice instinctively kindly, “the embersmoke of wonder” always in his eyes. If the collection radiates a special glow, it’s not only the hearthside glow of language well-crafted but, it seems, the wider light of a life well-lived.

—Carol Rumens, author of The Mixed Urn

In The Chances of Harm, Adrian Rice is a superb celebrant of the everyday, telling how though by times he may “feel that all of our days have really been the selfsame day”, he rejoices in endless wonders around him, birds flitting, dusky trees, a murmuration of leaves, the timeless surprise of snow. Compassion for others and his alertness to the poignancy of life’s brevity are rooted in the poet’s love for his wife and family and in friendships when sometimes unaware of “last leavings having already happened”.

—Micheal O’Siadhail, author of The Five Quintets