If All the World Were…

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If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old."The most impressive debut collection of the year so far: beautiful, sincere and unexpectedly heartbreaking Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph This poetic picture book is truly beautiful in every aspect. The book touches on a topic sadly, we all have to experience in our lives and for some children who may loose a grandparent whilst still young, this book gives a lovely idea about how to remember our loved ones. I would never have read this had it not been for @dylanthomasprize and that’s what’s great about reading long lists - discovering new writers and reading more widely.

I can’t confirm whether the child is a girl or a boy, and I suspect that’s probably the point. A bond between that generation gap transcends gender. Kids and old folks operate on a different wave-length from the busy in-between generations.

This 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: Trees’ services to this planet range from carbon storage and soil conservation to water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species – including us, through building materials. Yet we often treat trees as disposable: as something to be harvested for economic gain or as an inconvenience in the way of human development. Since our species began practicing agriculture around 12,000 years ago, we’ve cleared nearly half of the world’s estimated 5.8 trillion trees, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Nature.

I’ve been looking forward to this collection for months, having admired Stephen Sexton’s work since I first heard him read from his pamphlet, Oils. I was not disappointed! This is an imaginative, moving and fresh narrative poem. The title, If All the World and Love Were Young, comes from a pastoral poem by Walter Raleigh, while the poems themselves follow the structure of Super Mario World, each section named after a level of the game. This collision of lyric tradition and innovative, modern references is a defining element of Sexton’s work.For starters, if trees disappeared overnight, so would much of the planet’s biodiversity. Habitat loss is already the primary driver of extinction worldwide, so the destruction of all remaining forests would be “catastrophic” for plants, animals, fungi and more, says Jayme Prevedello, an ecologist at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil. “There would be massive extinctions of all groups of organisms, both locally and globally.” It seems Granddad might be from India or thereabouts, but we don’t really know that either. You can see the pictures on the wall and figure out what you can. But really, who cares? This is universal. As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss. This use of long lines paired with unusual imagery means the collection does not immediately yield its emotional weight to the reader. Instead, the reader travels to ‘Donut Plains’, where “Kappa swarmed in every colour under a waxing crescent moon” or to ‘Forest of Illusion’, as the reader encounters Sexton’s gift for imagery of the natural world, What a fascinating collection to read alongside Vuong’s Time is a Mother; in both books, the authors attempt to come to terms with the loss of their mum (each from cancer), through ingenious and inventive use of the carefully chosen terms and techniques of their poetry.