The exhilarating debut from award-winning poet Stephen Sexton.
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.
The most impressive debut collection of the year so far: beautiful,
sincere and unexpectedly heartbreaking
*The Telegraph*
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
*The Guardian*
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*
Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make
up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty
*Sally Rooney*
The best poetry of the year so far
*Sunday Times*
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.
*New Statesman Books of the Year*
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.
*New Statesman Books of the Year*
Poignant, playful yet disarmingly sincere, it's the year's best
debut
*Telegraph Books of the Year*
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.
*Caoilinn Hughes*
A remarkable requiem for the poet's mother and for the worlds of
childhood imagination...a beautiful, vital, generous work of
art
*The Stinging Fly*
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
*Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol*
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