I heard about this collection last summer, in a context that will sound a little insufferable, i.e. at a poetry roundtable at an Irish Studies conference where we were discussing a fairly experimental work, but bear with me: someone brought up this collection as a poetry collection that, yes, was concerned with place, as so much poetry is, but one of those places was the digital world of Super Mario Bros.
Well, that got my attention.
But also I was tired AF from jet lag so I promptly forgot the name of the poet and the book, so I was fucking delighted when I got my latest mailing from the Wake Forest University Press book club and HERE WAS THE BOOK: WFUP had picked up the American publishing rights and printed it along with Sexton’s follow-up collection. So, over the last month, I read it in fits and starts.
A more thorough description of its subject matter would be: this is a poetry collection that serves as an elegy or requiem for Sexton’s mother, who died when he was a kid, and video games were the world he could escape to, a place of happiness before her diagnosis that also served as a refuge during her treatment and after her death. It’s also about actual physical place and the natural world, and Elizabethan poetry that also deals with mortality and the fleeting pleasures of existence. Is that a lot? It’s a lot. Somehow the potential self-seriousness of it all is cut by the fact that each section of the book is named after a level of Super Mario Bros, and there’s a pleasure in seeing the interweaving of the real world and the virtual one. And the emotion of it all feels piercing and real, too, even from the first poem, which, like the last, is titled “Yoshi’s House”:
These are the days of no letters the magenta mailbox jitters
out of the visible spectrum babies chirp in our holly tree
mountains yield to the foreground and sadly again they’re beautiful:
my friends scattered in the lowlands the fire seizes in the grate
the smoke signals across the eaves say all I really mean to say
I have gone to rescue my friends I’ll think of you and you and you.
Of course “I have gone to rescue my friends” means the characters in the game but it also collides with the desire to rescue the person who cannot be saved, i.e. the poet’s mother, who both seizes what moments she can with her family but also slowly wastes away from cancer, finally dying in hospital when the young speaker is, to his fury and mortification, at McDonald’s, getting a bite to eat with a sympathetic relative.
It could all be such a dumb gimmick, but in Sexton’s hands it’s serious and genuine–not perfect, but somehow surprising and heartbreaking and excellent. If you read to the very very last page, you get the second “Yoshi’s House” poem to salve your soul a bit and send you away:
May this unhaunted house be yours and may it be happy and bright.
May the creak in the rafters be a sparrow returning to nest
after all these years and before the many more I step aside.
And if you find some day dear friend my sad head upon on your shoulders
go out into the world say world it’s been so long say world hello.
There’s something a little Yeatsian in that sparrow returning home to nest; there’s something of Ciaran Carson, Sexton’s mentor, in the long lines, though something more Sexton’s own in the breathless rhythm he accomplishes with them. All in all, it was a beautiful collection, and I’m looking forward to reading Sexton’s sophomore collection, once I get through a couple other poetry collections on my TBR.
(The Wake Forest cover is great, but the original Penguin UK one might be just a smidge better for its very direct homage to the font of the original video game. But the pseudo-pixelated landscape of the American edition is also some excellent design.)