Author: Stephen Sexton
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 29/08/2019
ISBN: 9780141990026 .
In reviewing circles across many mediums, nostalgia is often treated as a dirty word, a cataract that obscures one’s ability to be objective about the work in question. However, I recently read a poetry collection that interrogates the complex nature of nostalgia with such tenderness that it reminded me how magical the act of reminiscence can be. When a piece of media hits you in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, its significance can spiral out into something story-worthy, and nothing I have read thus far captures that emotion better for me than Irish poet Stephen Sexton’s debut collection If All The World and Love Were Young. Like the pastoral elegies from which it derives its name, the collection laments something lost, in this case childhood and the poet’s mother, but through the lens of a positive, imaginative influence on Sexton: the 1990 SNES game Super Mario World (see, don’t worry, I managed to link this to video games somehow). While I was profoundly affected by the poems’ tender depictions of childhood and the breathtaking use of the landscape to communicate grief, it was Sexton’s depiction of the mechanisms of nostalgia, its ever-expanding web of memories, images, and personal associations, that really won me over.
In conversation with The Telegraph’s Tristram Fane Saunders, Sexton said he initially “thought it would be kind of silly to write a book about Super Mario World […]to treat this absolutely seriously, to treat its landscapes as if they’re real landscapes” (Saunders, 2019). Reading the early poems in the collection, with their high-resolution analogues of familiar Mario iconography – where piranha plants are described as “carnivorous” (pg.6) and the rhinoceroses of Chocolate Island “dodder like a basso ostinato” (pg.63) – elements of the real world conflating with the abstract world of Super Mario are plentiful. Eagle-eyed gamerswill recognise the various references to each of the levels’ geometry and the Japanese myths that inspired Super Mario’s enemy design: the instantly recognisable koopa prompts a description of a “myth made of scales and razory claws / a shell of keratinous scutes the hard beak of an octopus / and a vulnerability to kicks on the head” (pg.7). It is like going to a convention and browsing the gallery of a geeky independent artist who recreates pop culture icons with realistic proportions and details. This comparison is not too farfetched, as seeing the 16-bit locales of Mario World rendered with such high fidelity and attention to detail replicates the imagination these colourful, abstract landscapes evoke in children. We see the Switch Palaces or the Ghost Ship and invent our own backstories for them, the kinds of postulations that lead to fan theories. In this way, If All the World and Love Were Young functions as not only “a kind of translation of Super Mario World” (Saunders, 2019) in that there is a tangible discourse between the developers’ ideas and Sexton’s interpretation of them, but a translation of what it was like to play that game all those years ago.
However, what started out as an ekphrastic piece on video games soon compelled Sexton to think about his youth in general. It was in this exercise that he discovered just how inextricably linked Super Mario World was to his identity in the real world at that time: “I remembered a photograph my mother had taken of me playing Super Mario World as a child, my back to the camera. I based the book on this image – me as Mario seeing myself” (Sexton, 2019). The perspective we get reading the collection is that of someone fully immersed in the game, whose life has been consumed by this virtual world, someone who has become Mario. The moment this photograph was taken is dramatized in ‘Yoshi’s Island 1’ when Sexton’s 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” (Sexton, 2019, pg.6). It is only when reflecting on this photograph years later that Sexton’s future self realises the true significance of that moment: “I remember myself being remembered a little lotus / 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” (ibid.). That first playthrough of Super Mario World is imbued with the spirituality of a religious experience and those trademark question blocks are the questions that adult Sexton ponders whenever he returns to that moment. Even this early in the collection, the object being scrutinised has switched from Super Mario World to Sexton himself.
In Sexton’s own words, “There’s a fundamental two-ness to the book: me and Mario; adulthood and childhood (or bigness and smallness, depending on the mushrooms); real landscapes and those in the video game. For large parts of my growing up in the 1990s, I was two people at once, or one person in two worlds” (Sexton, 2019). This double life manifests itself in various ways. The opening poem glimpses Yoshi’s cottage and adopts his fears that “my friends scattered in the lowlands” but adds the “babies chirp[ing] in the holly tree” (pg 5) from the poet’s garden just in the periphery of the TV screen. Often a single line is split between the digital and real world, as if the young Sexton routinely breaks his immersion in the virtual world to glance out at his mother tending to the garden: “My dreams reply the garden has become an ocean of lava / a precinct of spewing tephra” (pg.11) tracing the development of Mario World’s first world from lush plains to volcanic castle and blending it with his family’s garden-turned-hospital-precinct for his sick mother. My favourite instance of this doubling is the poem representing the ‘Top Secret Area’, a secret level where players can farm extra lives and power-ups at their leisure. One half of the poem is just the half-line “She plants roses in the garden” (pg.19) repeated. The other half shows images of what might spring from those flowers and the in-game item boxes. Entering ‘Donut Plains 1’, Sexton populates the level with “flight feathers” and “Chuck chuck[ing] his knuckleballs” (pg15) but cannot help drawing comparisons between the hole in Donut Plains’ map screen and Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. A dwelling on the opposite shore houses photographs of “us as babies pink and sleeping and as children formally posed in green and red fleeces” (ibid.) (sound familiar?). Whether the house is real or imagined and whether there are photographs depicting Sexton and his brother there, that for is the reader to determine. If All The World And Love Were Young is filled with such puzzles and imagery for its readers/players to unravel, just like a well-crafted video game, but they originate from a complex personal intersection of memories, sensations, and feelings.
At the same time, however, Sexton’s descriptions are so sophisticated that they can only reflect the expression of an adult – at least, I don’t know any children who would look at the Ghost Ship and think “Not a warship but a merchant brigantine adrift dishevelled / but seaworthy with no crewman or passenger footing its decks” (pg. 75) Much like the sorry state of games preservation, the memories of the adult cannot completely emulate the experiences of the child. The elegiac mood pervading the text is not just in remembrance of Sexton’s mother, but of the passing of childhood, too. He recalls how “Shigeru Miyamoto, the producer of Super Mario, said in some interviews that he wanted his games to be a destination for play that children would go to […] And looking back with a sense of nostalgia, it’s a place I wanted to go back to. Kind of like if you have a really nice holiday, from a really uncomplicated part of your life and you want to go back but the conditions will never be the same” again (Penguin UK, 2019).
Even if we can never truly relive our youth or the first time we experienced a piece of art, and even though the more adult themes of death take over the second half of the collection, the conclusion that Sexton eventually reaches is very hopeful. ‘The Valley of Bowser’ Poems see Sexton at his lowest. Witnessing his mother’s decline, he cries “Is it so that every world is only a world of enemies?”, (pg.81) weary of the journey. That world’s final showdown with Bowser is interrupted by the esoteric ‘Star Road’ and ‘Special World’, where Sexton’s tortured attempts to find a monument and a legacy for his mother result in an increased tendency to look for physical instances of permanence in the world, to no avail. He sees “the bird / has written its name in footprints” (pg.98) and “over the hearth soot began to sign its name” (pg.101). He returns to his childhood home, but it feels ghostly as “the roses swell and recede the begonias swell and recede [… while] the beautiful television decomposes in a landfill” (pg.102), becoming a kind of seed from which the inspiration for this poetry sprang. From then on there is only Bowser’s Castle left, here represented as Sexton bringing another TV into his home “the wood panelled box came sharp-cornered […] was it carried on four or six or eight sets of shoulders […] no it wasn’t the old TV / we carried her to the window” (pg.105). From these descriptions of the television as a box carried by “four or six or eight sets of shoulders” and the use of the pronoun “she”, the television, and the associated promise of replaying Super Mario World, serves as a way for Sexton to hold communion with his mother. It is when playing in front of the television that Sexton hears:
her voice mov[ing] around the edge of the world and now I think I
remember what I mean to say which is only to say 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 (105)
Finally, the title of the collection reveals its true significance, but it has been subtly subverted. The title ‘If All The World And Love Were Young’ is derived from the first line of the 1600 Walter Raleigh poem The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd, in which the nymph mourns that she cannot be with the shepherd because of his mortality. In Sexton’s collection, however, the line is no longer in the subjunctive and Sexton can remember “when all the world and love was young”. It is “once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its [the TV’s] light” (pg.105). The adverb “once” here is ambiguous as it can refer to a specific time in the past or, more hopefully, ‘as soon as’ as in ‘as soon as I sat in front of the TV again, I was able to relive those happy memories of my childhood’. While life might call upon us to face our mortality, say goodbye to loved ones, and fight that next boss, if we have positive memories there are always new adventures to be had, and the same books, films, video games we experienced in our youths can provide us with unlimited joy.
If All The World And Love Were Young represents an exciting opportunity for video game representation in literature, not because it might validate my nerdy hobbies in the cultural circles of high writing, but because it so perfectly captures the act of looking back to that first contact with a video game and how our memories grow to associate it with other events from our lives. I have barely begun to discuss the masterly way in which the elegiac mood sees Sexton’s mother’s pain invade the poet’s attempts to escape into Mario World or how the poems’ form tries to emulate the rhythm of a left-to-right 16-bit platformer (topics for another day, perhaps?), but it was this depiction of nostalgia that fascinated me above all else. It reminded me of how instrumental my own grandparents were in laying the foundations for my love of video games and reading, of days over their house playing games while wrapped up in a blanket. Reading If All The World And Love Were Young made me feel as if I were playing Super Mario World for the first time all over again through someone else’s eyes. It has revitalised the 30 year-old game for me, throwing the doors open to its interpretation and for that, I cannot thank Stephen Sexton enough.
Works Cited:
- Saunders, Tristram Fane, (2019, Nov. 23) Super Mario World, my mother’s death, and me: Stephen Sexton on turning video games into poetry [News article] Retrieved 14/12/2019 from The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/super-mario-world-mothers-death-stephen-sexton-turning-video/
- Sexton, Stephen, (2019) If All the World and Love Were Young. Penguin Random House UK: United Kingdom.
- Sexton, Stephen, (2019, Aug. 29) Stephen Sexton: ‘For me, death and Super Mario have always been connected’ [News article] Retrieved 14/12/2019 from The Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/stephen-sexton-for-me-death-and-super-mario-have-always-been-connected-1.3991940
- Stephen Sexton on the juxtaposition of poetry and Super Mario, (2019, Oct. 3) [Blog post] Retrieved 14/12/2019 from Penguin UK: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/sep/stephen-sexton-interview-super-mario/