If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old." As a gamer (so so sorry), this didn’t in any way chime with my own experiences of ecstasy or melancholy or even mindless escape into the digital world – it felt like a series of cryptic level synopses in clunky prose. In this book, the little girl keeps the memory of her grandpa alive through writing and drawing. This is such an important but beautiful message. Like the little girl, I imagine all the promises of adventure that my Granny and I planned. And that is what you call living memory. Sometimes we can't keep the people we love alive forever, but we keep them forever alive in our hearts. What if humanity mined every bit of uranium from Earth—approximately 35 million tons? Well, that’s enough to build ten billion Hiroshima bombs. Detonating all of these bombs would be an extinction-level event on par with the asteroid that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. Except this time, it would be the end of the Age of the Humans.

Shifters report feeling more connected to the world and less focussed on their individual identity. Pixabay/Pexels 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. A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the greats' Sunday Times But some tales are silent." I held her hand as she died. I will never forget its softness, and its small, small size - wizened by wrinkles and experience.

I found this to be a stunning piece of work. I wondered how mixing the world of Super Mario World with grieving would work, but somehow it just does! It had me smiling at the memories it created in my mind about playing Super Mario World and the escapism that the game offered, and had me crushed by his descriptions of watching someone he loves be so ill and dealing with loss and grief. Sexton and I are roughly the same age; we are, by the current definition, Millenials. This is the first collection I’ve read that captures something of being born around 1990, filtering life through cultural references, knowing that we live on a dying planet, and wondering what exactly we’ve been handed by earlier generations. Using Super Mario World as a jumping-off point allows Sexton to vividly explore the ways in which we’re indebted to pop-culture and how it defines not only our conversations, but our internal landscapes. He explores the expansiveness of video games, and the joy of escapism, as well as the ways in which it limits us. If all the world were memories, the past would be rooms I could visit and in each room would be my grandad.”

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. And there’s so many great moments undercut by lyrical tomfoolery! “As the world of the living peers / out into the world of the dead” makes you stop, is it out or in to, is it going both ways (this is the answer)... The poems are so bound to the central idea and the moment the photograph captured, an escape from reality frozen in time, an eternal escape but also a rendering of a dead past, an image of heaven, a transcendence, 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. If All the World Were... is a beautiful picture book focusing on the close relationship a granddaughter has with her grandfather. Through the change of seasons, we witness the special times they shared, as well as wishes the granddaughter has ("If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old"). He says "You're too old to hold hands. But still I hold his giant hand. And we explore, hand in hand."What a wonderful idea and what a wonderful book! A young child shows us what it’s like going through the seasons with Granddad. Lines like “to suffer suffer everywhere and not a moment stop to think” make me stop reading mid-poem. Idk if it’s because they seem desperate to reach for something deep, or because they read like they were written in 5 seconds and not touched by an editor. “I will have missed you for so long I will have / missed you” is so painfully earnest it just rings false. It isn’t convincing. And I think it knows it isn’t convincing, isn’t fully communicating the depth of the author’s grief, and so it overcompensates, but this only makes its incredibility further amplified. Even if we could live in a world without trees, who would want to?” Crowther says. “This planet is unique from everything else we currently know in the universe because of this unexplainable thing called life, and without trees, almost all of it would just be screwed.” This was ok. I think I like the idea of this book more than the actual content contained within. It's a collection of poems based on Super Mario and is mainly about a mother's death from cancer and memory. The Super Mario theme is obvs metaphorical for going on a journey, a quest, etc. I liked the poem about the uncle who was a miner, who died in Tasmania, as it creates an interesting parallel with Mario (who's a miner himself of sorts, isn't he?). The comparisons of Mario w Dante were also v interesting. I loved the poem that had the image of Otzi the Iceman, waiting for thousands of years with berries in his gut, extending a frozen hand. So cool! And the other poem about looking at fossils of dinosaur stampede and wonderig what spooked them. So yeah, as you can see, big theme here of time etc. The rhinoceroses dodder like a basso obstinato / in the valleys between mountains in their scooped-out eroded cirques. / If there is magic in their horns they seem indifferent to it / trudging along instead upon the khaki-coloured mountain path. / I want to call them dinosaurs but that’s not even kind of close: / those hundreds of millions of years that supercontinent makes break. / In Queensland there was that fossil showing a dinosaur stampede: / hundreds of sharp little talons but no sign of what had spooked them. / Thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes ago / these glyphs are all they’ve left behind. One clear night not so long ago / we all stood out in the garden wondering up at the comet / whose memory is very long who we hope still remembers us.”

illustrated with exuberant, floral richness ... (the) focus on memories as something visible, almost tangible, ready to be preserved and collated, may offer some consolation to the bereft child who feels powerless inthe aftermathof loss.', Times Literary Supplement

Beyond nationalism

Over time, Crowther predicts that we would see the release of 450 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere – more than doubling the amount that humans have already contributed. For a while, this effect would be offset by smaller plants and grasses. But while smaller plants capture carbon at a faster rate than trees, they also release it more rapidly. Eventually – perhaps over a few decades – these plants would no longer be able to head off the coming warming. “The timeline depends on where you are, since decomposition is much faster in the tropics than the Arctic,” D’Odorico says. “But once carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it doesn’t matter if it’s coming from here or from there.” I would like it even more if author had written more on child’s emotion after the loss and also parents’ involvement with their kid helping her to put her thoughts and emotions into that diary. It seemed like granddad thought about it beforehand kid just understood the purpose of that. This wonderful selection of poetry caught my eye a few months ago while I was browsing the shelves looking for something new to add to my collection. I saw the pixelated Super Mario coin on the cover and was immediately intrigued by the thought of the merging of poetry and video games (two of my loves, even though one of them is quite recent). I was not disappointed. Some lines I liked (see how direct and plainly stated they are? I just... don't like reading descriptions of mountains and cactuses): If you enjoyed/want to enjoy this book please don’t read this review: I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I thought I would and so I’ve gone ott trying to work out/justify why)

This beautiful, moving picture book tells the story of the treasured memories that a child has of hergrandfather...Thepoetic language that Coelho uses is perfectly complemented by wonderful illustrations in the text by AlisonColpoys', Reading Zone Then we go to a marvellous illustration of an imagination full of all of Granddad’s stories and ideas.Illustration of Granddad giving a special hand-made book and rainbow pencil to write down and draw dreams. 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” 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,