by Jay Rafferty
This 2019 poetry collection from the Queen’s University Belfast lecturer and NES enthusiast Stephen Sexton is a passionate and sentimental return to his childhood. I inhaled it, consumed it within an hour but don’t confuse enthusiasm for lack of content. You could spend days reading and re-reading any isolated piece from this collection and still not understand all of the complex emotional layers. This book will get under your skin and stick in your head like a bobby pin. It will bring you to the verge of tears by its final page.
Last month I had the pleasure of hearing Stephen Sexton read alongside the Canadian poet Kathleen McCracken at the John Hewitt Summer School in Armagh. To say I was surprised is an understatement. On stage sat a man I’d probably pass in the street and not think twice about, not some flashy celebrity, not a remarkably iconic face, I honestly wrote in my notes that he sounded like a priest. But writers are dangerous like that. You think them unremarkable at first then they start talking and their words and thoughts slip into your heart, your mind, your stomach. It’s nourishment for the soul to hear a good poet read their work and Stephen Sexton is a remarkable poet. Enough about the man though, over to the work.
Each poem in If All the World and Love Were Young is named (in chronological order) after every level in the 1990 release Super Mario World, dissecting the vibrant landscape of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Mushroom Kingdom while revisiting the memories of his mother’s death. The real heart of this collection is in the latter. I’m not often an empathetic reader, the last book I cried at was (don’t laugh) The Fault in our Stars when I was a teenager. Not since then had a book, fiction or otherwise, affected me so. But this collection, these poems wormed themselves into my affections. I empathized with the speaker and their mother in equal measure. The moment that struck me hardest was the final lines of ‘The Valley Fortress’. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Through the absolute minimal use of punctuation Sexton’s enjambed lines feel like the scrolling 2d platformer in print form. From Yoshi’s mailbox to the Valley of Bowser, Sexton walks from the 16-bit world to ours and back again, sometimes within the same line let alone the same poem. Never does this video game focus feel super imposed or corny. Without the titles to identify them as pixel prairies or plateaus a reader would swear these environments existed, that the poet had walked among them and taken tourist snaps like he was Ansel Adams. Sexton writes lines so tactile you could use them as a skipping rope, stanzas so sonorous I can hear them still while writing this. There’s only one word for a collection and poet of this caliber:
Wahoo!
Jay Rafferty is an uncle, an Irishman and an eejit. He’s the Social Media Manager for Sage Cigarettes Magazine and a Best of the Net Nominee. You read his poems in several journals including Dodging the Rain, Lights on the Horizon and the Alcala Review. When not playing games of pool he, sometimes, writes stuff. You can follow him on Twitter @Atlas_Snow.
