If All the World and Love Were Young

by Stephen Sexton

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 115
Rating:

Synopsis:

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 is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young, knowing it was based around classic video games, and I felt a bit iffy when I first plunged in at the lack of punctuation. A few commas really wouldn’t go amiss… but as I read on, something grabbed me anyway.

The whole collection is basically haunted by his mother’s cancer, the first attempts at treating it, and her eventual death, and I found that a sense of sleeplessness, dread and grief filtered through, even though I didn’t follow some of the poems, even though some of them just seemed weird. Little bits and pieces caught at me, like this one:

 I take the Orpheus route from world up into another
via footholds and fissures and bone dry mouths in the sheer rock’s face
into the brightly-lit waiting room and something like wakefulness.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of individual poems I loved, but something about the collection as a whole got to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)