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.

This book brings both poet and reader closer to a sense of what it means to live in our complex, beautiful, and unforgiving world. Bruce Rice in Life in the Canopy won second prize in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild John V. Hicks Manuscript competition in 2008 for Life in the Canopy as selected by Marilyn Dumont and Fred Wah. Cherie Westmoreland brings her remarkable vision to this book with several of her full coulour photographs adding a powerful dimension to the book.

Bruce Rice

Bruce Rice has published three books of poetry. Bruce's first collection, Daniel, received the Canadian Authors Association Award. In 2005, The Illustrated Statue of Liberty (Coteau), received a Saskatchewan Book Award. He also received Grain Magazine's 2002 Anne Szumigalksi Award for the best poem or sequence published in Grain that year. Poems from this collection were shortlisted in the 2008 CBC Literary Awards and were commissioned for the opening of the national tour of the Joe Fafard Retrospective Exhibition. His work has appeared in Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Grain,Canadian Author and Bookman, and Event. He has been antholgized in Heading Out: the New Saskatchewan Poets (all Coteau), Beyond Boarders (Turnstone/Twin Rivers Press), Facing the Lion (Beacon Press), Regina's Secret Spaces: Love and Lore of Local Geography (Canadian Plains Research Centre), and other collections. His work has been broadcast on CBC radio. He has collaborated on several poetry performances and excerpts were performed in Globe Theater's On The Line series.