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A Deft Poet of Grief
A review of Stephen Sexton’s melancholy and gentle book of poems, If All the World and Love Were Young.
By Nick Ripatrazone
September 3, 2024
In March 1998, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast “Something to Write Home About,” a meditation on place and poetry by Seamus Heaney. He began by paraphrasing Philip Larkin: “The secret of writing poems … is to find a subject that draws words out from your inner mind.” Heaney added that “since your inner mind is at bottom your childhood mind, it is no surprise that a poet’s words and subjects are often childhood ones as well.”
The program would have reached Belfast homes like that of Stephen Sexton. That same summer, while he was nine, Sexton’s mother took a photograph of him playing Super Mario World. His back to the camera, young Stephen faced “the huge block of the television,” on which the game unfolded. On his left, visible through a window, was “the garden, along which a little river ran and, over the fields, a dense forest.” The natural world juxtaposed with a pixelated one: a boy who would become a poet, quiet before an old television screen.
If All the World and Love Were Young, released in America by Wake Forest University Press, is a melancholy and gentle book of poems. Sexton’s introductory note, which describes the photograph, captures an important framing: this is a book about a boy and his mother, a boy and a game, and a boy and his grief. The book brings a wholly original sensibility to what Larkin and Heaney imagine to be the poetic inner mind, and in doing so, offers a heartfelt vision of game play as an elegiac action.
Sexton began writing the book in 2015 as a light-hearted trip through the levels of Super Mario World, a game for the Super Nintendo system. Yet he discovered, like other poets pondering the inner mind of their youths, that his creative vehicle revealed fraught memories about his childhood, and family.
His mother is ever present in the book. In “Yoshi’s Island 1,” an early poem, she conjures an almost mystical atmosphere: “My mother winds her camera the room is spelled with sudden light: / a rush of photons at my back a fair wind from the spectral world.” The camera’s flash creates a precise moment that is somehow also blurry, as young Sexton was “a cross-legged meditant for whom the questions floating in the air / are for a future self to voice decades from now who will return / again and again to this room and these moments of watershed.”
Sexton often eschews punctuation in his lines, a stylistic choice that takes some getting used to – but the result is appropriate to both his language and subject. Sexton’s lines are packed, rich with detail and sonorous, but perhaps most importantly, his subject requires blending across phrases and senses. In the second Yoshi’s Island poem, he writes: “Pixels and bits pixels and bits their perpendicularity: / one of the worlds I live in is as shallow as a pane of glass.” The glass pane, simultaneously, might be the curved television screen or the window at his side, which “sets a frame around the holly tree / wild funguses slimy with dew and toxicity the rubies / of holly berries sing on the branches the robins hide among / and the veins of ivy vines wind around the slumping trunk and boughs.”
People who bemoan generations of children raised on screens might be skeptical of the value of hours and hours spent in front of video games. (And to be certain, gaming in a windowless basement can begin to feel downright funereal.) Yet in Sexton’s world, nature was at his fingertips. The two worlds might coexist, perhaps even subsist each other. Certainly, the frequent game play eventually enters his psyche: “My dreams reply the garden has become an ocean of lava.”
Sometimes, in the face of grief, we might be lit by mysterious sources.
In Sexton’s world, the porous nature of the real and pixelated worlds is a result of his response to his mother’s illness. In “Donut Secret 2,” she says “If I’m going to die she says I might as well go to McDonald’s.” He leaves his game, and along “country roads we travel home by purple and glisten with frost / underneath the constellations and the Sagittarian moon.” He seeks a cheat code, the “secret of infinite lives.” In a columnar poem titled “Top Secret Area,” on the left side the phrase “she plants roses in the garden” is repeated, while on the right, the phrase is replicated yet subtly changed, as if a strained child is trying to thumb away eternity.
Sexton is a deft poet of grief, particularly of the mourning that precedes death. In “Cookie Mountain,” the boy must help his mother. “Since she can’t stand for very long I make tiffins for the bake sale.” But he worries that no one will like the mixture of sugar, syrup, and raisins. She “prints her name unsteadily on a white adhesive label for the biscuit tin that had been her mother’s before it was hers / her mother’s before it was hers: snow-topped mountains circling birds.”
They are both often reminded of death. In a later poem, mother and son “go together to the church on the hill over the village / the wild country green behind it. In other places it’s not noon / but here it is the coffin rests with a wealthiness of flowers,” a sojourn that recalls his travels in the game. Yet this trip to a funeral is painfully real. His mother “was a child” with the deceased. Sexton’s syntax is especially effective here, as speech, sound, and memory coalesce: “I am the light of the world says the sermon the stained glass window / says St. Peter with rays of light. The first color television / she ever saw was in her house my mother says and we all stand.”
In the final quarter of If All the World and Love Were Young, his mother’s illness worsens. They take regular trips to the hospital; leaving “beautiful” days and moving “through the automatic doors along the dull linoleum.” Perhaps out of necessity, Sexton ascribes mythic characteristics to his mother’s attending physician: “With his stethoscope slung around / his broad shoulders like an athlete with a towel Hippocrates / says for now the pain must stay here in the small room without flowers.” There is little else the boy can do but create a game of grief.
His mother’s words are heartbreaking. “It’s so short she says it’s so short it doesn’t feel like I’ve been here / at all and now I have to go.” Sexton hears her lamentations awash in the hospital room’s “bluish light.” They brought a small television from home to her room, but it is merely “standing by,” quiet.
Often the intersection of technology and literature is focused on the inhuman nature of the former. Technology, we are told, is the absence of humanity; we fear that it dulls our senses and distracts our focus. Perhaps we do succumb to its conveniences and contrivances. Yet books like If All the World and Love Were Young reveal a more complex possibility. Sometimes, in the face of grief, we might be lit by mysterious sources. At the end of the book, when the inevitable will soon come to pass, Sexton finds some comfort in his mother’s final acts, her struggle as a “witness” to “devotion.” Sexton makes a promise: “I will myself to contain it: a paean laboring under / so many feet I have taken in a breath of the world so huge / the rest of my life will be spent breathing the world into the world.”
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