Stephen Sexton – If All the World and Love were Young

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 17:38:01 +0000

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut If All the World and Love were Young is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal. He’s looking back, and there’s elements of the adult/child relationship there. It’s a book about loss – for the child, for activities, for relationships, for a life that has passed. You can see classical echoes, as well as the bucolic and arboreal – If all the world and love were young’ echoes the opening line from Walter Raleigh’s The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd a response to Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love – even as Super Mario World is clearly dripping in 1990s culture. It’s synesthetic, but not try hard. Sexton told the Irish Times ‘I’m fascinated by how verbal and visual signs correspond, but I grew a little bored of writing poems after paintings’ so three years after the death of his mother started writing this collection. All lines are of sixteen syllables; as Stephen Sexton explains in a note, ’16-bit refers to how much memory the system can process at one time’. It’s a bold telling, but also soothing, and dreamlike, and no wonder it’s on the list for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020.

dylan thomas prize – and so she thinks

Stephen Sexton – If All the World and Love were Young