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 is a previous Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, an essayist, and editor. His writing moves from family and community to social history and meditations on landscape and wilderness. Bruce’s six books of poetry have received two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a Saskatchewan Book of the Year nomination. His first book, Daniel, won the Canadian Authors Association Award. Judges said it “portrays life’s hardships with an elegance of language which is stunning.” He has been called a master of light. Whether writing about prairie or the urban forest outside his door, he says, “I became a better poet when I surrendered to beauty.” Bruce lives in Regina on Treaty 4 Territory and the Métis homeland.

Bruce Rice's profile page