Review of 'Flylyght' by Stephen Nelson

Flylyght
by Stephen Nelson

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press
2010


As a physical object, Stephen Nelson’s new collection Flylyght from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press is sort of unmanageable; sized A4 (always an awkward shape to slot neatly into a bookshelf) it feels sort of enlarged, like a book viewed under a microscope, or one of those giant chess-sets you sometimes see in parks. It’s an appropriate if somewhat counterintuitive sensation that carries through to the poems in the book, all of which are no more than a handful of words long, and many just one or two. Their ‘amplified-as-if-through-a-microscope’ quality comes from the increased focus and attention the relation between individual letters and words demands when presented so minimally. Take the title of the collection as the first specimen. A poem in its own right, ‘Flylyght’ recalls Aram Saroyan’s famous one-word poem ‘lighght’. Nelson exquisitely fuses the archaic (‘lyght’ for ‘light’) with the breezily modern (‘fly’ as ‘cool’, or its adverb ‘flyly’). It also reads as something of a manifesto or motto for minimalist poetry: “fly lyght”. I’m tempted to read this poem imagistically, depicting a fly hovering in the light, so that the fly and the light merge. In counterpoint, the archaic spelling of ‘lyght’ and the repeated ‘ly’ give the poem an ornate, unsettling, hovering quality, undermining any reductively singular reading.

Whereas Aram Saroyan’s minimalist poems usually sit smack in the centre of the page, solidly and even exhibitionist, Stephen Nelson’s poems shyly hug the left hand side, sometimes even seeming to slip down the spiny crease of the book like a coin down the back of a sofa. It’s an effect that adds to the ungraspable quality of many of these poems, where Nelson’s subtle interventions in words whose meaning we might think is stable gives them an odd, uncanny and fascinating sheen. This is particularly the case with the poems in which Nelson uses colour to alter our perceptions and responses. For example, one poem reads:

a bird
a bud
a buddha

In one sense this might be a simple garden scene: a bird, the bud of a flower and perhaps a garden ornament of a Buddha. The words themselves form a sweet little consonantal grouping of ‘b’s and ‘d’s. The vowel-sounds are a little more tricky, with ‘bird’ and ‘bud’ sounding almost identical but ‘buddha’ distinctly different. Highlighting the indefinite article before each word brings out their ephemeral, conceptual qualities.

The longest piece in the book is ‘silverlightminimalism’, a sequence of four shorter pieces in which the colour of letters is used to both sketch a scene and smudgily complicate its clarity, as in the use of pastels or chalk.


(water)


water


(light)


light


( )

-body-

[note: line-breaks not as they are in the book]

The interplay of textual effects beautifully mimics the complex interplay of light and reflection of a waterside moonlit scene. Empty parentheses stand in for the gradually sanded-away, shadowy words and notions, while the layout on the page suggests a lapping tide and a waxing moon.

Nelson also uses typographical effects to make words eerily unfamiliar, to cast them as it were, in a new light, as in this poem from early in the collection:

qhost

where the first letter of the word ‘ghost’ is replaced with a phantasmic ‘q’, to reveal the word ‘host’. I’m maybe getting carried away but it makes me think of ‘q’ as in ‘question’, and from there it’s just a short nudge before I can’t get the image of a spectral quiz show host out of my head. Hm. I think I probably am getting carried away, but that’s the sort of playful semantic jumps that Stephen Nelson’s surprising, delicate, deft and haunting poems drive you to. Stephen Nelson is a poet who deserves attention.