Listen to the Landscape is a magical book. The collaboration between artist and poet dance in a visual-verbal blending of words and color.

The color comes in the form of hand-colored photographs by Dianne Carroll Burdick, which have a luminous quality. Starting with a black-and-white photograph, the artist has transformed the reality if the image into a soft reflection of a dream world.

Photographed in her travels throughout the country, Carroll Burdick features scenes from California, Massachusetts, Michigan and other places where the landscape caught the artist’s eye. She is a freelance photographer well known in local artistic circles.

These photographs inspired Linda Nemec Foster to create haiku that capture the spirit of the landscape scenes. Written in the traditional Asian-style, Nemec Foster’s haiku resonate with the movement of a wave, the breath of a cloud, the green of trees.

She has written six other volumes of poetry and in 2003, she was selected to be the first poet laureate of Grand Rapids. This slim volume offers a tactile, yet spiritual experience. A meditative book for yourself or a perfect gift to share with friends, it even inspired this writer to try a haiku book review:

Scenes wet with color

Haiku captures the moment

Pages turn like waves