Poetry. Amiri Baraka calls MIRAGE "A fine book--important on painting." Basil King attended Black Mountain College as a teenager in the 1950s, and completed his apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist painter in San Francisco and New York. Since that time, his art has taken a different turn, reaching through abstraction back to surrealism and forward into a new approach to the figure. Although he did not begin to write regularly until 1986, an involvement with poetry has always been part of his life, first in doing art to accompany poems in books and magazines, later as a book artist, now as a poet/painter. Among his many books, THE EARTH SUITE by Carl Rakowsi, with drawings by Basil King, is available from SPD.

Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA

Basil King, a prolific, widely collected painter and a writer, first went to Black Mountain at 16. His paintings are in many public and private collections, including Yale University and the New York Public Library. His books of poetry include 77 BEASTS: BASIL KING'S BEASTIARY and MIRAGE: A POEM IN 22 SECTIONS.