High Desert//High Country: Seeds - Tapa blanda

The same couple who celebrated their love in Is Two::Becomes One here celebrate the Rocky Mountains of Northern New Mexico. From their home at 7000 feet near Santa Fe, they and their wire-haired fox terrier, Skelly, wander the high mountain-trails to Hispanic villages, ancient Pueblos, rivers, waterfalls, caves, meet Coyote, Snake, and Eagle. In their twelfth collaboration of this kind, Thomas Fitzsimmons, well known for creating a major series of translations of Japanese poets, joins 142 haiku poems to 110 Oriental Brush Paintings (Sumie) by Karen H-Fitzsimmons, who studied with a Japanese master during the 10 years they lived in Japan.

Thomas Fitzsimmons has won an unprecedented 3 NEA fellowships-as a poet, editor and translator -but it's the haiku written in collaboration with his wife, Karen, a sumi-e brush painter, that he feels is his finest artistic expression. Formerly writer/editor, The New Republic, (Washington, DC), feature writer, The Asahi Daily News (Tokyo, Japan), he is author, translator or editor of more than 60 books, 32 of which currently are in print. Emeritus Professor of Literature, Oakland University, he has received a number of honors, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (poetry, translation and belles lettres) and several Fulbrights to countries in Europe and Asia. In the mid-1970s, he and Karen Hargreaves-Fitzsimmons did a 16 month, 18 nation poetry-reading/performance/lecturing/workshop tour through the Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe under the auspices of USIS. They live just south of Santa Fe, where they publish Katydid Books, distributed by University of Hawai'i Press.