If All the World and Love Were Young

Description

The exhilarating debut from award-winning poet Stephen Sexton Memories of going 'through the looking-glass' into the land of video games are some of the most evocative of all childhood. In these poems we are rushed back to years spent playing Super Mario World, a place where people are small and flowers are large, a place of treacherous labyrinths and heart-stopping leaps of faith, where the materiality, wonder and peril of that world bleeds into our own as the young player bravely travels with his mother on the journey of her life-ending illness. Drawing on traditions of elegy and pastoral, this is a daring, moving and lyrically beautiful exploration of memory, grief and the unreal.

Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast. His poems have appeared in Granta, POETRY, and Best British Poetry 2015. His pamphlet, Oils, was the Poetry Book Society's Winter Pamphlet Choice. He was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition, the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2018.

The most impressive debut collection of the year so far: beautiful, sincere and unexpectedly heartbreaking -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph * An astonishing debut...The writing itself hardly draws breath; it's crowded and confident in range and depth...If poetry is "about" anything, then If All the World is about cancer, bereavement, family life, natural and material worlds and the nature of memory. Despite this range it is quite astonishingly through-composed....it is a book to gulp down at one sitting, then to return to, to savour * The Guardian * A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the greats...A wonderful piece of writing * The Times * Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty -- Sally Rooney The best poetry of the year so far * Sunday Times * Stephen Sexton's collection If All the World and Love Were Young has a playful quality and a lightness of touch that he somehow combines with the jagged-ness of grief to make a sequence of poems that is very fresh and eerily beautiful. It is clear from the first lines that this is a debut of significance, one that achieves a most difficult balancing act between wildness and control. -- Kevin Barry * New Statesman Books of the Year * There's virtuosity aplenty in Stephen Sexton's poetry debut If All the World and Love Were Young, too. Imagery and emotion interweave in a work of astonishing maturity by the young Northern Irish poet, whose impressive new voice promises to help refresh contemporary verse. -- Fiona Sampson * New Statesman Books of the Year * Poignant, playful yet disarmingly sincere, it's the year's best debut -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Telegraph Books of the Year * This is an extraordinary, moving collection of poems whose dense, constrained forms are the forms the intellect takes when it is coping; the self takes when it can, as it must; when the subject envelopes. This book is as rich and sustaining, as memorable and inimitable as is the loved one's voice. You will follow it across the Causeway, into the beached whale in Donegal, into the pixelated hyacinths and the heavy rain. With the munificent vocabulary of Alan Gillis and the gut-punched wisdom of Anne Sexton and Denise Riley, the speaker claims: 'I tried to make a monument from the emptiness of the house.' Sexton has made a monument. Readers: crowd around it. -- Caoilinn Hughes A remarkable requiem for the poet's mother and for the worlds of childhood imagination...a beautiful, vital, generous work of art -- Lily Ni Dhomhnaill * The Stinging Fly * This book of poetry is far beyond wondrous. A thing of devastating beauty ... anyone that loves language and has lost someone dear to them will drink this book down like an elixir. Even the book title seems to have an entire symphony in it. Thank you #stephensexton. This book is a gift to anyone that reads it. As it was for me -- Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol