Life in the Canopy

"Bruce Rice (in Life in the Canopy) pays careful attention to the music in language and presents this music through lines brimming with prairie life."---Marilyn Dumont

"Rice is a poet of potent and unexpected thought, who inhabits the level of consciousness beneath the surfaces of things."---Prairie Fire

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. 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. Regina poet Bruce Rice's Life in the Canopy won second prize in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild's John V. Hicks Manuscript competition in 2008.

Cherie Westmoreland brings her remarkable vision to this book with several of her full colour photographs adding a powerful dimension to the book.

Bruce Rice has published three books of poetry. Bruce's first collection, Daniel, received the Canadian Authors Association Award. In 1989, 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 forthe 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 (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.

Cherie Westmoreland is a Saskatchewan visual artist, working in the medium of photography, and is currently living in Regina.

Her work has been exhibited in group and individual shows and has been published in a variety of print publications in Saskatchewan and other parts of Canada. Her most recent exhibits include: two group shows at The Art Gallery of Regina - "Human/Nature", February, 2009 and "Pale Blue Dot", January, 2008; "New Work...The Emerging" at Regina's Traditions Gallery in March, 2006; "tete-a-tete - Fibre Art in Dialogue with Other Fine Art Media" with Martha Cole, Wellington County Museum and Archives, Fergus, Ontario in September of 2006: "Tree Dreams and Sky" at Traditions Gallery in the summer of 2004; "In One Place" at the Joe Moran Gallery in Regina, November, 2003; and "Dreams of Home", at The Rosemont Art Gallery (Art Gallery of Regina) in February, 2003.