For my second spot on the official Dylan Thomas Prize blog tour, I’m featuring the debut poetry collection If All the World and Love Were Young (2019) by Stephen Sexton, which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Sexton lives in Belfast (so this is also an incidental contribution to Reading Ireland Month) and was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition and a 2018 Eric Gregory Award.

The book is a highly original hybrid of video game imagery and a narrative about the final illness of his mother, who died in 2012. As a child the poet was obsessed with Super Mario World. He overlays the game’s landscapes onto his life to create an almost hallucinogenic fairy tale. Into this virtual world, which blends idyll and threat, comes the news of his mother’s cancer:

One summer’s day I’m summoned home to hear of cells which split and glitch

so haphazardly someone is called to intervene with poisons

drawn from strange and peregrine trees flourishing in distant kingdoms.

Her doctors are likened to wizards attempting magic –

In blue scrubs the Merlins apply various elixirs potions

panaceas to her body

– until they give up and acknowledge the limitations of medicine:

So we wait in the private room turn the egg timer of ourselves.

Hippocrates in his white coat brings with him a shake of the head …

where we cannot do some good

at least we must refrain from harm.

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.)

Apart from one rough pantoum (“Choco-Ghost House”), I didn’t notice any other forms being used. This is free verse; internally unpunctuated, it has a run-on feel. While I do think readers are likely to get more out of the poems if they have some familiarity with Super Mario World and/or are gamers themselves, this is a striking book that examines bereavement in a new way.

Note: Be sure to stick around past “The End” for the Credits, which summarize all the book’s bizarrely diverse elements, and a lovely final poem that’s rather like a benediction.

My thanks to Midas PR for the free copy for review.

The Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize recognizes the best published work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or under. All literary genres are eligible, so there are poetry collections nominated as well as novels and short stories.

To recap, the 12 books on this year’s longlist are:

• Surge, Jay Bernard
• Flèche, Mary Jean Chan (my review)
• Exquisite Cadavers, Meena Kandasamy
• Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan (my preview & an excerpt)
• Black Car Burning, Helen Mort
• Virtuoso, Yelena Moskovich
• Inland, Téa Obreht
• Stubborn Archivist, Yara Rodrigues Fowler (my review)
• If All the World and Love Were Young, Stephen Sexton
• The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
• Lot, Bryan Washington

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, April 7th.