If All the World and Love Were Young
  • Published: 25 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141990033
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 112

If All the World and Love Were Young

Formats & editions
EBook
25 Apr 2019
Paperback
29 Aug 2019
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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.
  • Published: 25 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141990033
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 112
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Praise for If All the World and Love Were Young

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

[An] astonishing debut...The writing itself hardly draws breath; it's crowded and confident in range and depth. Sexton takes the risk of avowing both the high stakes he's writing for, and his emotional presence, within the poems themselves...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

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

Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph