Growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota there was, in a neighboring town, a Utah and Idaho sugar beet factory. The sugar products were marketed with a simple U and I Sugar printed on their paper containers.
U and I Sugar became for us a common localism of endearment or comradery. The factory is long gone but the expression survives and I still find it surfacing in my conversation.
Because U and I Sugar so aptly suggests the personal and metaphorical content of the watercolor poems I have chosen it for the title of this book.
The water color poems are about relationships. They are about the intimate and complex relationships we have with, ourselves, those we love, the places where we find ourselves, and the seeming randomness of the everyday things we find around us. These ideas are abstractly expressed through a confluence of three separate visual voices and one verbal. They are like a fractured mirror with each segment reflecting a different view of the whole. What is reflected is brought together in the viewing, each in their own way, by the viewer.