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by John Challis (Author)
The rural terrain of John Challis's 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.
Author Biography
John Challis was born in London in 1984 and now lives in York. In 2015 he was a poet-in-residence with the Northern Poetry Library and chosen as one of the Poetry Trust's Aldeburgh Eight. His other residences have included 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 poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and published in journals including Magma, The North, Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, and elsewhere. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Northern Writers' Award for his work.
