Seeing the world anew A Contrary review by Grace Wells 
Petit Mal John W. Sexton Revival Press 2009 Buy this book> It is striking how many poetry collections are earthed by one seminal or signature poem—often a biographical poem which purports to be about someone else, yet which succinctly tells us more about the poet than the rest of the collection. In John W. Sexton’s Petit Mal, his ‘H.G. Wells, two miles from Botley’, fulfils this role, and stands as a mirror to the poet’s own delicious view. The wheels of a bicycle hum like bees, and in their turning Wells sees “futures:/cities tumbling through the space/between stars,/the moon a wasp-hollowed hive,/a man who could travel/ageless through years”. The poem ends with the telling lines, Later, cycling through the ribboning road, he knew that God was in his head thinking the world anew. More excitingly than any other poet presently writing in Ireland, Sexton thinks the world anew. His poems offer us a unique, provocative adventure through a landscape surreal as a dream, lyrical and terrifying as a fairytale. Yet for all its absorbing forays into the visionary, his work remains anchored by a profound and often painful wisdom. Breathing the exotic into plainness, Sexton pushes back the flawed boundaries of ordinary life. In ‘As my mother casts cities asunder’ “piles of curled potato-peel accumulate beside the sink” offering up “white jewel-like cities” with “industrial furnaces burning.” He satisfies our desire for a world porous with imagination, potent with subconscious symbology readable on the surface of the quotidian like Braille. Sexton describes lawns that “dream of flight,” dirt in a nail coagulating into a blackbird, moths that settle on a poet like a coat, eye-lashes woven into a square, yet his spirited playfulness is anchored to cool experience. He and his school-friends grew up breathing “the waste fumes of the sweet factory, our young tongues acrid/our minds opening up to the dullness of the world.” His short essay ‘The Goddess of Merciless Love,’ reminds us that poets are apprenticed to life, to craft and to “Despair. Unlike the other two, this one isn’t optional. Everyone gets to serve this one.” Throughout the collection Sexton’s innovative fantasy crackles with anarchic electricity. Occasionally he leaves us behind to forge deeper into his own personal fairytale than we, as outsiders, are able to travel, but for the most part his finger is so accurately on the pulse of shared sorrow that even if we don’t understand where we’re being taken, our emotions are still engaged, Sexton’s lyrical power binding them, in poems such as ‘the moon’s ring fades’, to a world where angels shake their wings and free them of lice and the rusted doors of heaven move no more Unquestionably Sexton has the visionary power and imaginative reach of writers such as H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Heinrich Hoffman and Edward Lear, but his almost feverish scope for creative conjuring is matched by an equal and outstanding dedication to craft. This makes for a rare balance of energies and Petit Mal is filled with fine sestinas, villanelle, sonnets and ballads. It’s almost bewildering how these roller-coasters of thematic range and image are held together, and so ably poised, by their containment within form. Solid stepping-stones of biographical poems pace the collection. Because Sexton embeds them in startling images, the characters of his extended family become rooted in our own memories: his mother searching for her son opens the wardrobe to see if he has become a coat, his father’s same search has him balancing on a fence, looking down on the “ragwort-clotted artery of the alley,” while Sexton’s grandfather passes away with twenty-five sparrows bursting from his chest, and, in a dream, Sexton’s grandmother walks back to Ireland beneath the sea. This is urgent, essential work that provokes and lingers on, it deserves multiple readings as Sexton goes his own way down his own road deeper into a world populated by creatures like the ‘invisible horses,’ who “know no rest, never stop for breath, never sleep.” Grace Wells is a British poet living in Ireland, her collection, When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things, is forthcoming from Dedalus Press.. Index of Reviews...>https://sites.google.com/site/revivalpress/Reviews_2010.htmlhttps://sites.google.com/site/revivalpress/Home/Petit%20Mal%20Cover%202.jpg?attredirects=0shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1
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