In the First Half-Century that I've Loved You

Often poet Alan Feldman--whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic as well as Best American Poetry--would give his wife, artist Nan Hass Feldman--whose work has appeared in 59 solo exhibitions and 29 museum exhibitions--a poem for their anniversary, her birthday, or Valentine's which she collected into a private album.

In the First Half Century That I've Loved You combines these personal poems over more than fifty years with poems about Nan from Alan's award winning collections and intersperses them with 51 paintings, mainly intensely colorful landscapes and interiors focusing on houses and the home among the more than a thousand that Nan has produced.

Publisher Bill Zavatsky writes: "Alan has always held close to the idea of home, and in fact some of his strongest poems center on his experience (a shared experience naturally) of home and marriage and children, including parents and grandparents. House and home are also central to Nan's work, and if their marriage sometimes seems to have been made in heaven, heaven is a structure with walls, a roof, and a furnace. Just as Alan's poetry brings the universe to us through particulars, Nan's interiors reflect both her eye for detail and her imagination. Her colors are astounding, making me think of Van Gogh. She has been enormously prolific over the years, and we (meaning the selection committee of Nan, Alan, and I) could have filled two or three more books with reproductions of her work as dazzling as these."

As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis sums it up: "Even Emerson, New England's great preacher of self-reliance, has to concede the truth that 'a fruit tree, looking at a fruit tree, becomes fruitful.' So Alan and Nan, living for fifty years in the company of each other's art, have been inspired to fill the world with apples."