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. Rioce's poems speak eloquently of our connection to the natjural 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 difficultethical 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 Saskatcheewan 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.
Rice is a poet of potent and unexpected thought, who inhabits the level of consciousness beneath the surfaces of things.
- Prairie Fire (Review of Illustrated Statue of Liberty)
