Stephen Sexton's debut collection If All the World and Love Were Young won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was named 'a debut fit to compare to Seamus Heaney' (Sunday Times ). He also received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition and the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He teaches at Queen's University, Belfast.
With poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the
stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious
with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem
possible: the simplest things and the most mysterious - which, of
course, are one and the same.
*Geoff Dyer*
'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a
poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred
years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death
of a Naturalist," though, of course, Heaney was already Heaney by
the time I read that book. Then again, Stephen Sexton is already
Stephen Sexton-these poems glow with a welcoming confidence and
with a particularness that is local everywhere, and are full of
surprising moments that immediately become part of how one
understands the world. Cheryl's Destinies is a course of
miracles.
*Shane McCrae*
In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with
itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these
poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.
*Seán Hewitt*
Stephen Sexton is a fabulous poet: gifted with a delicate ear, a
humane and generous sensibility, and attentive to both the
absurdities and the wonders of modern life. It's a joy to read
these unexpected and thrilling poems.
*Nick Laird*
Cheryl's Destinies illuminates with a chorus of the dead, the
living and the yet to be discovered. Cheryl, who is really into the
tarot, is here to foresee, but this collection also excavates.
Poems 'mosey through the graveyards of the world' where the dead
speak to us and with us. Séance loving Yeats collaborates with
Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan (as you do), while Ciarán Carson is
remembered with vibrancy as the young poet recounts Carson's
influence in Belfast and beyond. Sexton is as imaginative as he is
controlled, spinning an enduring and trancey tapestry. At once
playful and dystopic, hilarious and original - you won't have read
poetry like this. He is a rare talent.
*Elaine Feeney*
His pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title), tarot card
clairvoyant, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside
many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot
Sexton cannot slip... many of his phrases are so good I wanted to
steal them...Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his
intercessor.
*The Observer*
Brimful multiplicity... grief-fuelled odysseys, time melting
forwards and backwards as Cheryl's tarot evokes Madame
Sosostris
*Irish Times*
Stephen Sexton writes with such ease and lightness of touch that
you're too charmed to check where he's leading you, until you look
down and notice, Bugs Bunny-like, that you've walked off a cliff...
Sexton writes like a lover of life. His "deliberate happiness"
often manifests as a kind of defiant whimsy. He's not, in the end,
flinching away from what he can't face, but transforming it with
warmth and humour into something luminously strange... He's not
whistling through the graveyard to hide his fear, but out of
unfeigned joy. Long may he dabble and mosey.
*The Telegraph*
A witty, compassionate act of time travel
*Financial Times Books of the Year*
Fleet-footed and irrepressibly charming
*The Telegraph Books of the Year*
Opens dazzling windows of wonder into multiple worlds. The patterns
in Cheryl's tarot cards reflect time-bending truths about art and
history
*The Irish Times*
The garden of Cheryl's Destinies is wild, Rousseau-lush, magic-hour
lit ... Sexton's flair comes in balancing the otherworldly with the
very ordinary, acutely observed detail ... joyous and often very,
very funny
*Poetry Review*
The spring-loaded poems of Cheryl's Destinies foreground questions
about art and authenticity, belief and make-believe, the
inescapable presence of history and the contingent self in crisis
... many of the poems in Cheryl's Destinies vibrate not only
forwards but backwards as Sexton continues to unlock the
possibilities of poetic form.
*The Times Literary Supplement*
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