"Inner Tension/In Attention": Steve McCaffery’s Book Art

Abstract

Steve McCaffery’s poetic career had its inception in the northern England of the late sixties; his biggest influence was the concrete poetry/concrete art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Emigrating to Canada in the early seventies, McCaffery worked both on sound-text poetry and on artists’ books, producing a series of remarkable illustrated books—Ow’ Waif, Dr. Sadhu’s Muffins, Intimate Distortions, Knowledge Never Knew—which combine word and image and, more important, treat the book as a composite whole, spacing, typography, arrangement, white space, letter size, etc. all working together to create a field of play. He is therefore all but impossible to anthologize and his work belongs more properly with artist’s books than with conventional poetry.