Bruce Rice Poetry Collection

The Bruce Rice Poetry Collection

The Vivian Poems

These poems peel back the layers of suburban life and the American Dream. Vivian Maier was a self-taught street photographer who worked as a nanny for wealthy employers in New York and Chicago. The poet imagines her as a documentarian who is compassionate, abrasive, and meditative, while her subjects provide their own narrative. More than anything, the poems are a response to her work, which is all we have that comes directly from her. It is a deliberate challenge to the “mystery nanny” she is reduced to in much of the constructed narrative of her life.

Life in the Canopy

The "canopy" in the title refers to the tree-lined streets of Rice's Regina neighbourhood but through his piercing specificity we learn more about "place" in the first decade of a new century. Rice's poems speak eloquently of our connection to the natural world, including the forests and landscapes we have created within our cities. With a voice that speaks unflinchingly of its sources Life in the Canopy is an exploration of the history and bones of a modest city in the center of the continent. With a profound authority and honesty Rice examines how we live with each other and how the place we live in shapes our lives. What is a city? Is it more than its public realm; the trees, parks and lake, railways and neighbourhoods? Is it more than the slow unrolling of human experience and event? Here are insightful, moving poems that take on difficult, ethical, and aesthetic questions.

The Trouble with Beauty

Close observations of, and meditation on, the dispassionate beauty of the natural world lead one poet to inquiries into the relationship between the beautiful and the perceiver of that beauty. Bruce Rice was moved to words by the natural beauty he saw during repeated travels along Seven Bridges Road just west of Regina and in the landscape around Eastend and the Cypress Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan. As he sought to express the beauty he saw in those places on their own terms, without imposing the ego of the poet, he found resonances of himself in what he was seeing - the landscape began to write him.

Distinguished by its long unhurried lines and its vivid descriptions of the Saskatchewan landscape, The Trouble with Beauty is an absorbing and moving collection of poetry about the contemporary hunger for transcendence or, what the poet calls "the mysteries/God didn't plan for." Powerfully elegiac, these poems can be read as a single sequence, an ongoing almanac of the poet's inner weather, in which epiphanies are hair-triggered to the most ordinary occurrences – "the push of a breath on the back of a small clump of grass."

Bruce Rice

Bruce Rice is a writer and editor living in Regina. He writes about community, reclaiming the voices of those who live on the margins, and how we are transformed by landscape even as we leave our footprints on it.  He has five award-winning books of poetry. He received his second Saskatchewan Book Award for his most recent collection, The Trouble With Beauty (Coteau). In 2019 he was appointed to a two-year term as the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate.