If All the World Were…

Product Information

and now I think I / remember what I mean to say which is only that once / when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing / once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light” Even if we could live in a world without trees, who would want to?” Crowther says. “This planet is unique from everything else we currently know in the universe because of this unexplainable thing called life, and without trees, almost all of it would just be screwed.” I’ve been looking forward to this collection for months, having admired Stephen Sexton’s work since I first heard him read from his pamphlet, Oils. I was not disappointed! This is an imaginative, moving and fresh narrative poem. The title, If All the World and Love Were Young, comes from a pastoral poem by Walter Raleigh, while the poems themselves follow the structure of Super Mario World, each section named after a level of the game. This collision of lyric tradition and innovative, modern references is a defining element of Sexton’s work. This beautiful story tells the love that one little girl has for her ageing grandad. They spend each season having fun together but she knows he is not well. One day he isn’t there anymore, but the little girl finds evidence of their happy times together. She knows she has memories and imagination enough to keep her grandad alive and she remembers him smiling and laughing.

A touching and sensitive text that doesn’t dwell on the sadness. There are some lovely lines that are really memorable: ‘If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad’s birthdays so that he would never get old.’ The bright colours and wonderfully painterly illustrations are also lively and vivid. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The W-87 warhead carried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of 300 kilotons. The B83 nuclear freefall bomb, carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons.For a collection of poems that leans heavily on gamer references about a fun thing to play, it is heavily draped with sorrow and grief. I liked the way that he varied the pace and structure of the poems, and having those two themes running all the way through, it builds into a narrative thread and feels like we are sharing his grief. Definitely one to read again one day. As a gamer (so so sorry), this didn’t in any way chime with my own experiences of ecstasy or melancholy or even mindless escape into the digital world – it felt like a series of cryptic level synopses in clunky prose.

Sexton mixes a more conventional poetic vocabulary with a specialist one: medical terms, modern brand names and vernacular speech all seep into even his most flowery, descriptive poems. The combined effect is often gorgeous. Taken from ‘Yoshi’s Island 4’: I love the concept of this book and it sometimes lives up to its premise, but overall it fell a bit short for me. The poet weaves together his childhood experiences of playing Super Mario World with those of dealing with his mother's illness and eventual death. When the book works, you can real feel how the imagery of the game is bleeding into reality and the reality is influencing the child's understanding of the game. I will myself to contain it (I thought this was SUCH a beautiful line about learning to deal with/manage grief about the death of a parent) I want my monument to be composed of light you might say / so you can see it friend not things themselves but the seeing of them / the light stopping on them tree I adore you I adore you world”Lines like “to suffer suffer everywhere and not a moment stop to think” make me stop reading mid-poem. Idk if it’s because they seem desperate to reach for something deep, or because they read like they were written in 5 seconds and not touched by an editor. “I will have missed you for so long I will have / missed you” is so painfully earnest it just rings false. It isn’t convincing. And I think it knows it isn’t convincing, isn’t fully communicating the depth of the author’s grief, and so it overcompensates, but this only makes its incredibility further amplified. If we no longer bred farm animals, what would happen? Would they become extinct? Would they overrun the planet? Some lines I liked (see how direct and plainly stated they are? I just... don't like reading descriptions of mountains and cactuses): Printed sources: - Christeson ( A Playford Assembly), 2015; p. 47. Christian ( A Playford Assembly), 2015; p. 47. Karpeles & Schofield ( A Selection of 100 English Folk Dance Airs), 1951; p. 15. Kidson ( Old English Country Dances), 1890; p. 1. Raven ( English Country Dance Tunes), 1984; pp. 24 & 39. Sharp ( Country Dance Tunes), 1909; p. 27. Vanilla Secret 2 (flax and poppy and sloe berries reaching out of the frozen earth extending a frail hand as if to say I'm here it was lonely)

Super Mario settings provide the headings: Yoshi’s Island, Donut Plains, Forest of Illusion, Chocolate Island and so on. There are also references to bridges, Venetian canals, mines and labyrinths, as if to give illness the gravity of a mythological hero’s journey. Meanwhile, the title repeats the first line of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh, which, as a rebuttal to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” eschews romanticism in favor of realism about change and mortality. Sexton wanted to include both views. (He discusses his inspirations in detail in this Irish Times article.) If All the World Were... is a beautiful picture book focusing on the close relationship a granddaughter has with her grandfather. Through the change of seasons, we witness the special times they shared, as well as wishes the granddaughter has ("If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old").

Why we need trans-nationalism

But some tales are silent." I held her hand as she died. I will never forget its softness, and its small, small size - wizened by wrinkles and experience. While it took me a while to grasp the way that Sexton writes, I was soon completely enamoured and hooked by his writing and sped through the whole of the book on a short one-hour flight from Glasgow to London. The poems within the book each take their title from a different world or setting within the Super Mario Universe such as Yoshi’s Island. Each poem takes us through the journey of Sexton growing up and delving into the world of video games as a way of escaping the illness that is taking his mother’s body. One pertinent finding from my own research as a psychologist is that people who experience high levels of wellbeing (together with a strong sense of connection to others, or to the world in general) don’t tend to have a sense of group identity. If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old." This use of long lines paired with unusual imagery means the collection does not immediately yield its emotional weight to the reader. Instead, the reader travels to ‘Donut Plains’, where “Kappa swarmed in every colour under a waxing crescent moon” or to ‘Forest of Illusion’, as the reader encounters Sexton’s gift for imagery of the natural world,

I apologise. This review comes from the heart and not the mind. Please bear with me - this book has tugged at my heartstrings and stabbed me straight through. The rhinoceroses dodder like a basso obstinato / in the valleys between mountains in their scooped-out eroded cirques. / If there is magic in their horns they seem indifferent to it / trudging along instead upon the khaki-coloured mountain path. / I want to call them dinosaurs but that’s not even kind of close: / those hundreds of millions of years that supercontinent makes break. / In Queensland there was that fossil showing a dinosaur stampede: / hundreds of sharp little talons but no sign of what had spooked them. / Thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes ago / these glyphs are all they’ve left behind. One clear night not so long ago / we all stood out in the garden wondering up at the comet / whose memory is very long who we hope still remembers us.” I would like it even more if author had written more on child’s emotion after the loss and also parents’ involvement with their kid helping her to put her thoughts and emotions into that diary. It seemed like granddad thought about it beforehand kid just understood the purpose of that.

Follow us

Note: I received e-ARC of this book via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Publishers and NetGalley. *** IF ALL THE SEA WERE INK. AKA - " If the sea were ink." AKA and see " Ah! Where Is the Vow?," " Lay His Sword By His Side." Irish, Air (4/4 time). C Major (Walker): G Major/E Minor (O'Neill): E Flat Major/Mixoldyian (Holden, Stanford/Petrie). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (Stanford/Petrie, Walker): AAB (Holden, O'Neill). The title is a companion to Playford's " If All the World Were Paper." Together the rhyme constitutes the first verse of a comic poem appearing in John Mennes and James Smith's Facetiae, published in or after 1658: A moving, lyrical picture book about a young girl's love for her granddad and how she copes when he dies, written by poet and playwright Joseph Coelho. This beautifully illustrated, powerful and ultimately uplifting text is the ideal way to introduce children to the concept of death and dying, particularly children who have lost a grandparent.