If All the World Were…

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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: 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 world were memories, the past would be rooms I could visit and in each room would be my grandad.”

I highly recommend this read for people of all ages as a reminder that even though we're all missing people, our memories of those who are gone help us to keep them alive in our hearts. If you enjoyed/want to enjoy this book please don’t read this review: I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I thought I would and so I’ve gone ott trying to work out/justify why)This is such a sweet gentle book about all the memories the little girl has of her grandfather, throughout the year, and how much she loved him, and how sad she is that she can not have those walks with him.

At first I was like this is not how I remember Yoshi’s House...but as it went on, invoking Super Mario World made all the poems have an extra edge and a real landscape. I forced myself to stay up to finish them all because it felt like both something I couldn’t put down and some of its power lies in being completed in one sitting. Like finishing a game when I had a full day to play it, it’s like a condescending version of that. As a gamer (so so sorry), this didn’t in any way chime with my own experiences of ecstasy or melancholy or even mindless escape into the digital world – it felt like a series of cryptic level synopses in clunky prose. This is such an important book for children who have lost their grandparents - not just children. I was a grown woman when I lost Granny and it's helping me deal with my loss. 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,

Beyond nationalism

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 One pertinent finding from my own research as a psychologist is that people who experience high levels of wellbeing (together with a strong sense of connection to others, or to the world in general) don’t tend to have a sense of group identity. The loss of trees would also be mourned on a deep, cultural level. Trees are staples of countless childhoods and feature heavily in art, literature, poetry, music and more. They have factored into animistic religions since prehistory and play prominent roles in other major religions practiced today. Buddha attained enlightenment after sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree for 49 days, while Hindus worship at Peepal trees, which serve as a symbol for Vishnu. In the Torah and Old Testament, God makes trees on the third day of creation – even before animals or humans – and in the Bible, Jesus dies on a wooden cross built from trees. This poetry collection piece together a memoir of Stephen Sexton's younger years, structured around his obsession with Super Mario World. I had anticipated this to be a fun anthology, due to the brightly coloured cover and the gaming elements the synopsis hinted at. It was far from that and all the more poignant because of it.