Poetry. Thomas Fitzsimmons went into World War II as an underage merchant seaman just after Pearl Harbor and was discharged from the USAAF just after Hiroshima. IRON HARP is a book about the memories, hard and sweet, which linger throughout a lifetime. One man's century -- from a depressed New England mill-town in the 1920's through the spirit-splintering insanities of World War II, to renewal in love, and on to glimpses of grace in Japan, along the Mediterranean, and in the high desert of New Mexico. Many of these poems are poignant evocations of battle and its emotional aftermath and leave the reader shuddering as to the undeniable folly of war. Magnificent. Brutal truth. A stunning combination of raw autobiography and epic poetry. I admire it greatly -- Keith Wilson.

Author City: Santa Fe, NM USA

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 Repuclic, (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.