Born just north of Belfast in 1958, a child of the Ulster “Troubles”, Adrian Rice found the lifeline of poetry at high school, but didn’t start writing until his mid-twenties, his first poems coming out (as one Ulster poet put it) “fully formed”. From the early exploration of the creative constrictions and liberations of the northern Protestant tradition, to his mind-full meditations on his American porch, Rice, in this startlingly rich and emotionally varied collection, fashions and recovers lores of place and belonging. The Strange Estate: New & Selected Poems 1986–2017 is a landmark collection on both sides of the Atlantic.

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