Lithis Press, paperback
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Publisher Marketing:
Book of poetic recollections and homages to the painters and poets, to the writers and makers he knew and studied while at Black Mountain College,
from the Introduction by Ian Brinton… Basil King has dedicated Transition to the memory of the Black Mountain College he knew in the early 1950s: ‘a wonderful place, desperate place’. It was a place in which as a young man he was ‘blown to where light abstracts the smallest thing into the core of a vernacular, into the heart of the abstract’. It was a place in which Charles Olson had told the young Mike Rumaker, who was also there in the early 1950s, to be like the ancient Greek traveller and geographer Pausanias and “go out and see for yourself and come back and tell what you saw and heard, first hand.’
King goes back to the roots and then explores the growth, the development. Writing about the thirteenth-century painter Giotto he tells us that there is a corollary between the painter’s friend Dante’s use of language and Giotto’s own use of the three dimensions:
