Cheryl's Destinies

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. – Kate Kellaway * 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. – Tristram Fane Saunders * 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 *

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.

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