If All the World Were…

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For starters, if trees disappeared overnight, so would much of the planet’s biodiversity. Habitat loss is already the primary driver of extinction worldwide, so the destruction of all remaining forests would be “catastrophic” for plants, animals, fungi and more, says Jayme Prevedello, an ecologist at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil. “There would be massive extinctions of all groups of organisms, both locally and globally.” You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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”

It seems Granddad might be from India or thereabouts, but we don’t really know that either. You can see the pictures on the wall and figure out what you can. But really, who cares? This is universal. I love the concept of this book and it sometimes lives up to its premise, but overall it fell a bit short for me. The poet weaves together his childhood experiences of playing Super Mario World with those of dealing with his mother's illness and eventual death. When the book works, you can real feel how the imagery of the game is bleeding into reality and the reality is influencing the child's understanding of the game. A tidily aching memory of pixels and loss. A little overworked in its sectional correspondence to the levels of the original Mario game. However, this device is one of two which give a beautiful structure and aesthetic to Sexton's grief: written in 16 syllable lines to match the 16 bit memory of his console, through these clunky sentences and strange landscapes he draws a simple nostalgia and a rich thread of imagery which bring the reader "in through the translucent panels of the front door stained with roses". Yes, that's what a 16-syllable line feels like! To conclude with another excellent pair, What a fascinating collection to read alongside Vuong’s Time is a Mother; in both books, the authors attempt to come to terms with the loss of their mum (each from cancer), through ingenious and inventive use of the carefully chosen terms and techniques of their poetry. His work has poetry and performance at its heart, drawing on over 16 years' experience running dynamic creative literacy sessions in schools. He aims to inspire young people through stories and characters they can recognise.As of July, my grandmother will have been gone from this world for 3 years. She was such an integral part of my life that I still feel a gaping hole in my chest that never gets smaller. IF ALL THE SEA WERE INK. AKA - " If the sea were ink." AKA and see " Ah! Where Is the Vow?," " Lay His Sword By His Side." Irish, Air (4/4 time). C Major (Walker): G Major/E Minor (O'Neill): E Flat Major/Mixoldyian (Holden, Stanford/Petrie). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (Stanford/Petrie, Walker): AAB (Holden, O'Neill). The title is a companion to Playford's " If All the World Were Paper." Together the rhyme constitutes the first verse of a comic poem appearing in John Mennes and James Smith's Facetiae, published in or after 1658: 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. 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.

The whole collection is tightly tied to one idea: the death of Stephen Sexton’s mother, framed by his obsession with Super Mario World. And that idea works. It works incredibly well, somehow never feeling repetitive. He says "You're too old to hold hands. But still I hold his giant hand. And we explore, hand in hand." IF ALL THE WORLD WERE PAPER. English, Country Dance Tune (6/8 or 6/4 time). D Major (Karpeles, Raven, Sharp): C Major (Kidson, Playford). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (Karpeles, Raven, Sharp): AB (Kidson). "If all the World were Paper" was first published by John Playford as a round dance for eight persons in his English Dancing Master (1651) and in subsequent editions of the long-running Dancing Master series through the tenth edition of 1698. The last volume was published by John's son, Henry. "If all the World were Paper" is a one-strain tune in the Playford cannon. A second strain was composed for it in the mid-1960's by Everal de Jersey at the behest of musician, choreographer and researcher Pat Shuldham-Shay, and it is the version played for dancing today. If All the World Were... is a beautifully illustrated poem about a girl's relationship with her grandfather, encompassing both her joy as she spends time with him, and her sadness at his eventual passing. Some lines I liked (see how direct and plainly stated they are? I just... don't like reading descriptions of mountains and cactuses):

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The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The W-87 warhead carried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of 300 kilotons. The B83 nuclear freefall bomb, carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons. 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. Super Mario settings provide the headings: Yoshi’s Island, Donut Plains, Forest of Illusion, Chocolate Island and so on. There are also references to bridges, Venetian canals, mines and labyrinths, as if to give illness the gravity of a mythological hero’s journey. Meanwhile, the title repeats the first line of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh, which, as a rebuttal to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” eschews romanticism in favor of realism about change and mortality. Sexton wanted to include both views. (He discusses his inspirations in detail in this Irish Times article.) Thank you Netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group (Frances Lincoln Childrens) for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. 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,

At points it feels like writing through all of the levels is done just for the sake of completionism... The collection runs in circles around ideas of memory and place and the reliability of both, and loss and haunting and escape and disreality, collecting ideas haphazardly, like so many golden coins – it builds its thesis and atmosphere by collage, gradually but not methodically. The same effect could be achieved with less meandering, and likely with more impact as a result. Trees’ services to this planet range from carbon storage and soil conservation to water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species – including us, through building materials. Yet we often treat trees as disposable: as something to be harvested for economic gain or as an inconvenience in the way of human development. Since our species began practicing agriculture around 12,000 years ago, we’ve cleared nearly half of the world’s estimated 5.8 trillion trees, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Nature. 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 If All the World were Paper” first came to prominence during the reign of Charles I and was published in a collection called Witt's Recreation that contained a pot-pourri of poems, puzzles, witty sayings and other such material. However the rhetorical questioning scheme of the piece is an ancient construction, and can be found in nearly every culture in every part of the world. The Playford rhyme is said to be a parody of the elaborated language used in ancient Jewish and Medieval Adoration. A Chaldee ode sung in synagogues during the first day of Pentecost includes the lyrics:

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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. Printed sources: - Smollet Holden ( A Collection of Favorite Irish Airs), c. 1841; p. 10. O'Neill ( Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies), 1903; No. 552, p. 97. Stanford/Petrie ( Complete Collection), 1905; No. 770, p. 192. Walker ( History of Music in England), 1924; No. 128, p. 335. Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney