If All the World and Love Were Young

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 
Winner of the E. M. Forster Award 
Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 
Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize 
 
A Sunday Times, New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 
 
'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 
 
'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the greats' Sunday Times 
 
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.

The most impressive debut collection of the year so far: beautiful, sincere and unexpectedly heartbreaking

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

A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the greats...A wonderful piece of writing

Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty

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.

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.

Poignant, playful yet disarmingly sincere, it's the year's best debut

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.

A remarkable requiem for the poet's mother and for the worlds of childhood imagination...a beautiful, vital, generous work of art

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

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.

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

With poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possible: the simplest things and the most mysterious - which, of course, are one and the same.

'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death of a Naturalist," though, of course, Heaney was already Heaney by the time I read that book. Then again, Stephen Sexton is already Stephen Sexton-these poems glow with a welcoming confidence and with a particularness that is local everywhere, and are full of surprising moments that immediately become part of how one understands the world. Cheryl's Destinies is a course of miracles.

In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.

Stephen Sexton is a fabulous poet: gifted with a delicate ear, a humane and generous sensibility, and attentive to both the absurdities and the wonders of modern life. It's a joy to read these unexpected and thrilling poems.

Cheryl's Destinies illuminates with a chorus of the dead, the living and the yet to be discovered. Cheryl, who is really into the tarot, is here to foresee, but this collection also excavates. Poems 'mosey through the graveyards of the world' where the dead speak to us and with us. Séance loving Yeats collaborates with Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan (as you do), while Ciarán Carson is remembered with vibrancy as the young poet recounts Carson's influence in Belfast and beyond. Sexton is as imaginative as he is controlled, spinning an enduring and trancey tapestry. At once playful and dystopic, hilarious and original - you won't have read poetry like this. He is a rare talent.

His pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title), tarot card clairvoyant, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot Sexton cannot slip... many of his phrases are so good I wanted to steal them...Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his intercessor.

Brimful multiplicity... grief-fuelled odysseys, time melting forwards and backwards as Cheryl's tarot evokes Madame Sosostris

Stephen Sexton writes with such ease and lightness of touch that you're too charmed to check where he's leading you, until you look down and notice, Bugs Bunny-like, that you've walked off a cliff... Sexton writes like a lover of life. His "deliberate happiness" often manifests as a kind of defiant whimsy. He's not, in the end, flinching away from what he can't face, but transforming it with warmth and humour into something luminously strange... He's not whistling through the graveyard to hide his fear, but out of unfeigned joy. Long may he dabble and mosey.

A witty, compassionate act of time travel

Fleet-footed and irrepressibly charming

Opens dazzling windows of wonder into multiple worlds. The patterns in Cheryl's tarot cards reflect time-bending truths about art and history

The garden of Cheryl's Destinies is wild, Rousseau-lush, magic-hour lit ... Sexton's flair comes in balancing the otherworldly with the very ordinary, acutely observed detail ... joyous and often very, very funny

The spring-loaded poems of Cheryl's Destinies foreground questions about art and authenticity, belief and make-believe, the inescapable presence of history and the contingent self in crisis ... many of the poems in Cheryl's Destinies vibrate not only forwards but backwards as Sexton continues to unlock the possibilities of poetic form.

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't 
 
It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once. 
 
Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: 'Edelweiss' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it's practically always the anniversary of something terrible, but there's always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. 
 
A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Cheryl's Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize-winning If All the World and Love Were Young, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today.

Stephen Sexton

Praise for Cheryl's Destinies

With poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possibl ...

'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death of a Naturalist, ...

In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.

With poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possibl ...

'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death of a Naturalist, ...

In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.

With poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possibl ...

'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death of a Naturalist, ...

In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.

Books by Stephen Sexton

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