The Trouble with Beauty
- Author Name: Bruce Rice
- Award Year: 2015
- Publisher: Coteau Books
- Tags: Nominee 2015, Poetry Award, Shortlist: Poetry Award
About the Book
Given all we have done to the lands that we live in, is it still possible to write honestly about 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 poetís 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.
About the Author
Bruce Rice has published five books of poetry, including Coteau’s Descent into Lima (1996) and Saskatchewan Book Award-winner The Illustrated Statue of Liberty (2003).
Bruce’s first collection, Daniel, received the Canadian Authors Association Award, and his most recent title, Life in the Canopy, was a finalist for Book of the Year in the Saskatchewan Book Awards. He received Grain magazine’s 2002 Anne Szumigalksi Award for the best poem or sequence published in Grain that year. His work has been broadcast on CBC radio and he has collaborated on several poetry performances and excerpts which were performed in Globe Theatre’s “On The Line” series. Born in northern British Columbia, Bruce Rice grew up in Prince Albert and spent a decade in the Canadian Maritimes before settling in Regina where he continues to live and write.