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 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.

Bruce Rice's profile page