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Articles by Stephen Sexton
Selected Poems by Jacob Polley
Skip to main content Imprint: Picador Over the two decades since his award-winning debut, The Brink, Jacob Polley has earned a reputation as one of the major poetic talents to come out of the north of England. Rooted in the folkloric inheritance of Reiver country – in its rhymes and spells, its work and weather – his poems conduct the electricity of the English lyric tradition into modern vessels and remastered forms.
Nintendo and the plumber who conquered the world
Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun Guardian Faber, pp.304, 20 It’s not more than a parlour game, perhaps, to speculate about history’s most crucial inventions. One invention often makes the next possible. Electric light revolutionised human productivity, allowing us to work well beyond sundown. The combustion engine and later the turbine engine collapsed our sense of distance, putting other continents within a day’s travel.
'The Head of a Man' by Stephen Sexton
Then among the final years of the horse, cannon are horse-drawn along the river into position at the edge of June. The day is hot, the Capels are abroad, so azimuths are set, trajectories approximated, an eighteen-pounder bombards the Four Courts and its garrison. Public records rain over the Liffey. What this thing is is too massive to rain: Pleadings Made to the Law Exchequer, 1773; a few fragments whose outer edges are ash forever, whose centre has been fused into new species of vellum and ink.
A Poem by Stephen Sexton: 'The Comic Turn'
April 30, 2023, 8 AM ET On April 10, 1998, political leaders signed the Good Friday Agreement, a peace deal largely ending the Troubles, a violent 30-year conflict between British unionists and Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland. I wrote “The Comic Turn” to acknowledge the 25th anniversary of the signing. — Stephen Sexton In the cave-dark days of tribes and spears, one of us made the image of a hand blowing ochre and spit through a bone pipe.
On the Tallest Horse in the World
"Horses in the Mist" by Flickr user Susanne Nilsson (CC BY-SA 2.0) By Stephen Sexton | December 10, 2021 Mirrors are not occult with bedsheets, no communion of pipes and tobacco: there is nothing— farewell Big Jake, alas— nothing here approaching a wake.
Cheryl's Destinies
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once.
Stephen Sexton
Books Articles Biography Stephen Sexton Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection A New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney.
If All the World and Love Were Young
Skip to Content Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Winner of the E. M. Forster Award Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize A Sunday Times, New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney.
If All the World and Love Were Young
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Winner of the E. M. Forster Award Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize A Sunday Times, New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney.
From “Terrestrials” by Stephen Sexton
A sparrow weaves over the derelict terrace the psychics used to meet in toward the snow-garnished mountains! They brought their lozenges of grief here, held each other’s pallid hands and summoned reeds of kindness into their voices! The men down tools, take lunch, smoke in a row, dangle their legs from the wall! They’re kids mostly; a xylophone of hard hats tuneless in the rain! The half-built apartment block is waiting and they will never live there! I knew a boy who wanted to be a pilot so...
The Burdens by Stephen Sexton
Before any of it, a goat appeared in a piebald sweater, beardless and tethered at the collar on half a tennis court of land up a rutted lane above the road. Doubtless a horse once clip-clopped there before a trap, a whip, a tweed of farmer with bushels and crates of cabbages, parsnips, blue duck eggs to pay the country doctor. Not now, and not then, we drive home between the fields. She is radioactive, or lately was, and sleeps on the doses of nitrogen mustard a country doctor has called for.
The Chair | VQR Online
The old Hitachi dual cassette was pain and elegant with age, and the branches were, and the sash window was open with pain, and the afternoon was adequate, and pain. Children rollerskating in the street were pain and the hum of the imminent sunset was. Would I say today was, and all today’s heirs? Yes, I would bet tomorrow morning on it. My mouth these many years was wealthy with pain. For so many years, I thought prodigal meant destined to return transformed and beloved.
The Poetry Society: Poems
The radicals sprung the locks that night, hurrah! and their lovely collarbones were almost moonly. Rhinos shrieked and bellowed, elephants tromboned and the animals nosed into town. Sunrise to sunrise and sunrise we kept indoors. If you can’t count your onions, what can you count my grandfather used to say. He said a lot of things.
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