The rural terrain of John Challiss second collection provides a new lens for exploring history, class and work, our relationship to the natural world, and cycles of growth and decay. Much of his debut collection The Resurrectionists concerned working lives in the city: his father a London cabbie, his grandfather a market porter. Here his focus shifts to a crumbling stately home in Northumberland brought to life through the voices of the grounds as well as those who inhabit it and maintain it. London is at a distance. We find ourselves beyond, in backyards, on motorways, in fields, searching for the green patch in Kent, where an East End family picked hops in the summer. Despatches from the early years of fatherhood reflect on ageing, loss and patience. Poems set in the American west consider the idea of freedom. And on the eve of his execution, thief and folk hero Jack Sheppard flees into the forest of his mind. Confronting the tension between wanting to belong and the desire to escape, these poems acknowledge and reckon with the people and places that haunt us.
Arvustused
In John Challiss superb first collection, the past has not finished with us. It pursues and provokes and questions what were about. Entire vanished or vanishing worlds of work on the East End docks, at Smithfield, in the pre-Murdoch print, at the wheel of a black cab reveal vivid traffic between the living and the dead. In rich, urgent combinations of the dramatic and the lyric, Challis adds new energy to the poetry of history, in the tradition of Harrison, Smith, Dunn and Wainwright. In its embrace of both the political and the metaphysical, and in its tender regard for ordinary life the book is both timely and necessary. -- Sean O'Brien These poems throw a great arc of light out of the citys storeyed past into the present, place, trades, family, vulnerable fatherhood. Here, balanced at the very edge, where 'light will fall out of our language' John Challis shines his words into the workings of the heart and of nature, with all their unpredictable transformations. -- Imtiaz Dharker In his debut collection, The Resurrectionists, John Challis reminds us how both personal and collective histories remain a part of our present.... this is poetry as archaeology, though with a lyric alchemy that can conjure a heap / of gangrenous bodies at a plague-pit excavation in modern London. Challis commemorates the lives of working London people butchers in Smithfield market, a cabbie father, barrow boys and cockle pickers in poems that reflect on class politics while generally avoiding nostalgia.... The Resurrectionists is alive to both the individual moment and the long perspective. -- Ben Wilkinson * The Guardian *
Born in London in 1984, John Challis has held several residencies. In 2015 he was a poet-in-residence with the Northern Poetry Library and chosen as one of the Poetry Trusts Aldeburgh Eight. His other residences have include ones at Keats Shelley House in Rome, and at Seaton Delaval Hall, a National Trust property in Northumberland, which produced Hallsong, a collaboration with filmmaker Christo Wallers. His pamphlet, The Black Cab (Poetry Salzburg, 2017), was a 2019 New Writing North Read Regional title. His first book-length collection, The Resurrectionists, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021, and will be followed by his second, The Green Parcel, in 2026. His poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and published in journals including Magma, The North, Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, and elsewhere. John also writes reviews and essays, most recently for Wild Court, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Poetry School. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Northern Writers Award for his work. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University, where worked as a Research Associate, and he now teaches at York St John University. He lives in York.
