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foggy_rosamund's review
5.0
Other people may be excited about the publication of Sally Rooney’s new novel: I’ll be pleased to read that too, but first I am busy being over-the-moon about Stephen Sexton’s second book.
This is Stephen Sexton’s first full-length poetry collection, as his first, If All the World and Love Were Young, was a book-length elegy. Cheryl’s Destinies gives Sexton room for a more varied range of themes, including the Smashing Pumpkins and the Addams Family, as well as meditating on our understandings of the present, past and future. Sexton’s work retains the emotional depth of his first collection, as well as the juxtaposition of pop culture, such as the video game Street Fighter II, with philosophical questions.
The first poem in this collection, The Curfew, won the 2016 National Poetry Competition, and is a brilliant and imaginative piece. It compares two very different things: animals being released from a zoo, with the tragedy of trapped miners, a group that includes the narrator’s grandfather. The depiction of the grandfather is playful,
Yet Sexton also captures the vulnerability and gentleness of this man, in a raw and poignant moment when he says:
Meanwhile, the dreamlike imagery of the zoo animals creates a sense of chaos, perhaps an external evocation of the depth and confliction of emotions held below the surface of this poem. The animals also provide a contrast with the trapped miners, as we witness
This poem has a brilliant lightness of touch that makes it funny and easy to read, but also contains such depth of imagery and theme that it can be read over and over and is very hard to summarise.
The Curfew is typical of this collection: poems are big in scope, even when short in length, and have lots of space for subtlety and depth. Sexton’s writing is deft and easy to read, but his work asks for multiple rereadings, and doesn’t yield all of its ideas at once. Sexton’s work reminds us why we read poetry: the complexity of being alive, the unanswerable questions and conflicting ideas, cannot be expressed without it. Sexton reaches towards the places where language struggles to travel and gives us words for the inexpressible. That said, he’s also very funny: in You Don’t Say we being with “A gorgeous big lump of a horse of a bar / of English elm,” and in For Gomez, “wrought iron gates wanting oil / are spiked with poignards élégants”. In Street Fighter II the poem sticks faithfully to is silly premise, describing how, “he’s more leg than man, more man than pixel” but also brings the reader up short, calling the future a “black mirage” and describing the moon as “like melted bone, like someone’s severed limb.” The poem uses its wit to unsettle the reader and get under their skin.
Sexton’s voice is often wry and self-deprecating: he uses this particularly affectively in O Brother, a description of being tricked out of money in a dreary bus station where
In this poem, and in this place, “We’re all past our glory.” Sexton uses the bleak imagery of the bus shelter to explore the different directions our lives take, how the future is never what we expect, and no matter how hard we try, we let people down. He does this in spare lines, capturing “some upping of anchor and drifting apart” that makes a family relationship rocky, and explains that loss and lives travelling in different directions is not abandonment:
At the end of the poem, Sexton yet again gives money to the man who is pretending to have a sick brother in another city, giving of himself, “my sympathies, my smithereens of pelvis”. This beautifully musical poem captures in six verses a depth of estrangement from the self, and a sense of loss, and this is part of what makes Sexton’s poetry so memorable and so brilliant: he can capture complexity in so few words and with such directness that he makes it seem easy.
Sexton is a magician, and each of these poems has something in it that chimed with me or that made me want to reread it. I’ve only touched on a few of the poems in this review, but all are worth talking about, and I hope that many people will read and talk about them. Sexton finds magic in ordinary things – a fountain, a bus station, a video game – and makes us realise that none of them were ever ordinary. His work captures the grimness and sadness of being alive in 2021, but does not leave us without hope. In A Short History of Happiness we find ourself in “a good man’s” “lovely office”
This is Stephen Sexton’s first full-length poetry collection, as his first, If All the World and Love Were Young, was a book-length elegy. Cheryl’s Destinies gives Sexton room for a more varied range of themes, including the Smashing Pumpkins and the Addams Family, as well as meditating on our understandings of the present, past and future. Sexton’s work retains the emotional depth of his first collection, as well as the juxtaposition of pop culture, such as the video game Street Fighter II, with philosophical questions.
The first poem in this collection, The Curfew, won the 2016 National Poetry Competition, and is a brilliant and imaginative piece. It compares two very different things: animals being released from a zoo, with the tragedy of trapped miners, a group that includes the narrator’s grandfather. The depiction of the grandfather is playful,
If you can’t count your onions, what can you count
my grandfather used to say. He said a lot of things.
Yet Sexton also captures the vulnerability and gentleness of this man, in a raw and poignant moment when he says:
when no more than the thought of the pink crumple
of his infant daughter’s body came to mind
a glow would swell in the pit, the men
would mayhem bauxite by the light
his tenderness emitted.
Meanwhile, the dreamlike imagery of the zoo animals creates a sense of chaos, perhaps an external evocation of the depth and confliction of emotions held below the surface of this poem. The animals also provide a contrast with the trapped miners, as we witness
the shakedown squad of chimpanzees
who bang and bang on the grocery windows
This poem has a brilliant lightness of touch that makes it funny and easy to read, but also contains such depth of imagery and theme that it can be read over and over and is very hard to summarise.
The Curfew is typical of this collection: poems are big in scope, even when short in length, and have lots of space for subtlety and depth. Sexton’s writing is deft and easy to read, but his work asks for multiple rereadings, and doesn’t yield all of its ideas at once. Sexton’s work reminds us why we read poetry: the complexity of being alive, the unanswerable questions and conflicting ideas, cannot be expressed without it. Sexton reaches towards the places where language struggles to travel and gives us words for the inexpressible. That said, he’s also very funny: in You Don’t Say we being with “A gorgeous big lump of a horse of a bar / of English elm,” and in For Gomez, “wrought iron gates wanting oil / are spiked with poignards élégants”. In Street Fighter II the poem sticks faithfully to is silly premise, describing how, “he’s more leg than man, more man than pixel” but also brings the reader up short, calling the future a “black mirage” and describing the moon as “like melted bone, like someone’s severed limb.” The poem uses its wit to unsettle the reader and get under their skin.
Sexton’s voice is often wry and self-deprecating: he uses this particularly affectively in O Brother, a description of being tricked out of money in a dreary bus station where
The café’s closed today and forever;
the coffee machine cappuccino
is a consommé of dust and hard water.
In this poem, and in this place, “We’re all past our glory.” Sexton uses the bleak imagery of the bus shelter to explore the different directions our lives take, how the future is never what we expect, and no matter how hard we try, we let people down. He does this in spare lines, capturing “some upping of anchor and drifting apart” that makes a family relationship rocky, and explains that loss and lives travelling in different directions is not abandonment:
just time’s taking on a different music;
deltas, lemon groves, paddy fields, the world
framed by the windows of high-speed trains.
At the end of the poem, Sexton yet again gives money to the man who is pretending to have a sick brother in another city, giving of himself, “my sympathies, my smithereens of pelvis”. This beautifully musical poem captures in six verses a depth of estrangement from the self, and a sense of loss, and this is part of what makes Sexton’s poetry so memorable and so brilliant: he can capture complexity in so few words and with such directness that he makes it seem easy.
Sexton is a magician, and each of these poems has something in it that chimed with me or that made me want to reread it. I’ve only touched on a few of the poems in this review, but all are worth talking about, and I hope that many people will read and talk about them. Sexton finds magic in ordinary things – a fountain, a bus station, a video game – and makes us realise that none of them were ever ordinary. His work captures the grimness and sadness of being alive in 2021, but does not leave us without hope. In A Short History of Happiness we find ourself in “a good man’s” “lovely office”
where the magic amaryllis
despite his never watering it
shows new, majestic, red flowers.
pippa_post_lit's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
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