Hayward Publishing’s newly released book, The New Concrete, celebrates and surveys the rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.

Edited by poets Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, The New Concrete is a fairly comprehensive tome that introduces, examines and celebrates the landscape of concrete poetry in the 21st century, gathering together work created since 2000 from contemporary artists and poets all over the world.

The accessibility of digital text and image manipulation, modern print techniques, and the rise of self-publishing have invigorated a movement that first emerged in an explosion of literary creativity during the 1950s and 1960s — and this new, beautifully produced volume provides an illustrated overview of those works that have helped bring visual poetry to a new audience, via a (relatively) new platform.

It’s that sense of modernity that’s key, as Victoria Bean states in her short piece about how the book came to fruition. “The New Concrete is not about how concrete poetry relates to the past but how it relates to our immediate world, how it responds to our culture and its rapid changes. What is it reflecting back to us, hiding from us, trying to make us see?”

View a few spreads from the book below and pick up your copy of The New Concrete here.

 

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