Following in the footsteps of what was once mass immigration from Ulster to the Carolinas, Northern Irish poet Adrian Rice has become a modern land breaker of poetic territories. In his new volume, Hickory Station, there are poems of Northern Ireland memories and others of Appalachia and the Low Country. Rice knows how to bear simple and eloquent witness to family life, the reckonings of self, and to distant and adopted homelands. Like many before him, Rice cannot forget the fields and woods outside the porch, the animals that make up the world without us. His poems are concise, poignant, and lyrical. Hickory Station is a warm-hearted, beautifully crafted tour de force. -Jefferson Holdridge