Nicola Winborn Reviews Toys for Telepaths by Stephen Nelson (Red Fox Press, 2023)
Life is circular, atemporal. Every cell an instance of time travel.
- Martin McInnes
When Stephen Nelson’s Toys For Telepaths (Red Fox Press, 2023) arrived at my home, I had just finished reading the novel In Ascension by Martin McInnes (Atlantic Books, 2023). “Every cell an instance of time travel”: this reference to the cosmic implications of molecular biology appears in the closing section of this moving science fiction narrative. It might equally apply to each image in Nelson’s incredible visual poetry book. For this is what I experience as I traverse its wondrous pages: time travel and dimensional leaps, as Nelson splices Greek, Tibetan and Roman alphabets together, bringing them into contact with each other through his bold visual choreographies across each page.
Toys For Telepaths is published by Red Fox Press, Ireland and is part of their ‘C’est mon dada’ series. It is a small A6 sized text, which fits perfectly into one’s hands. The whole ‘C’est mon dada’ series is hand stitched and hand bound: in our world of endless screens, this tactile link to the literary past is most welcome. Moreover, the nature and aesthetics of the papers, cloths, threads, colours and inks used in these Red Fox Press editions is pitch perfect in every way! The ‘C’est mon dada’ series is therefore an ideal fit for Nelson’s graphic, direct and yet intricate style of visual poetry.
Nelson’s latest Vispo volume contains 36 images in total. Most of them have a monochrome palette but some of them also incorporate colour: layers of yellow and green letters float behind a dominant and foregrounded black and white symbolism in one piece, the whole composition contained inside a perfect square. This creates a window where we can view multiple layers of reality simultaneously. In another image, soft dots of orange fill in 5 hollow rounded ‘o’ shapes, one of which is the final part of a question mark. Although they are scattered across the page, these orange circles hold together all the same, like a configuration of stars in the night sky.
When Stephen Nelson first received his own copies of Toys For Telepaths, he filmed himself speaking about his book and his artistic approaches to visual poetry in Castle Burn Glen in Scotland. I love this video and really enjoy seeing Stephen’s work framed against living trees, plants and sky. For this is one of the things I feel Toys For Telepaths is doing: it is a conversation with nature and a dialogue with Nelson’s own bond with the natural world. Some of the pieces in the text resemble snowflakes, with each symbol or glyph knitted and stitched to its neighbours. And like snowflakes, each stitch, each relationship between its constituent parts, is unique and a feat of organic engineering. It’s as if Nelson’s poems are the songs of the streams, leaves and flowers in his beloved glen. Incantations which he alone has heard, transcribed and delivered to us, so we can view them in thanks and in wonder.
In his artistic statement at the start of Toys For Telepaths, Nelson states that he is interested in “The visual appeal of letters or marks”, and creating spaces where the viewer can “open” themselves to new and fresh meanings, thereby escaping our culture’s constant need to get us to “follow a stream of words” of pre-prescribed meanings. When we view the art work in this text, we see Nelson’s eclectic alphabets with new eyes - familiar letters or shapes become strange, uncanny even. Toys For Telepaths is a superb volume of visual poetry with numerous strengths, not least Nelson’s immense ability to make us aware of letters as art forms, so that we reorientate and recalibrate our perceptions, sharing with him in his beautiful expositions gathered from “the outer reaches of consciousness”. Toys For Telepaths takes me on such journeys and unlocks my awareness in countless ways: I enter a dream state where his visual compositions are dance movements for our present day feet, mathematical equations for our future minds or the morphic blue prints of endless mountains, rivers and trees.