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.

Too often though, I didn't really see much of the game being reflected in the poems or get any sense of why specific elements of the game were important to the author. Having a poem dedicated to each level just seems to push the concept too far. From my own experience, particular games really do summon up strong memories and emotions from the time when I originally played them, but that doesn't mean that every single level holds a rich vein of meaning.For a collection of poems that leans heavily on gamer references about a fun thing to play, it is heavily draped with sorrow and grief. I liked the way that he varied the pace and structure of the poems, and having those two themes running all the way through, it builds into a narrative thread and feels like we are sharing his grief. Definitely one to read again one day. The realities of death and loss are brought gradually to the reader’s attention, allowing their impact to be experience on many different levels, such as the loss of an imagined future, the loss of faith in the body, the loss a companion, the loss of a way of being, the loss of family. Sexton is very much in control of his work: he brings the reader with careful and exact patience to the heartbreak, so that we become part of the journey of loss. Super Mario World aids him in this: it allows the reader to share an internal landscape with the narrator of the poems, so that we we feel the grief as our own, so that when the narrator says, “this is the wrong universe among all the universes,” we are with him. 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.)

I apologise. This review comes from the heart and not the mind. Please bear with me - this book has tugged at my heartstrings and stabbed me straight through. Unconventional subject matter for the very young is presented with gentle humour and a sense of great joy He says "You're too old to hold hands. But still I hold his giant hand. And we explore, hand in hand." and now I think I / remember what I mean to say which is only that once / when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing / once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light”

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Illustration of Granddad giving a special hand-made book and rainbow pencil to write down and draw dreams.