John Challis’s debut pamphlet Black Cab (Poetry Saltzburg, 2017), was a New Writing North Read Regional title. His first full collection was The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe, 2021). He has been highly commended by the Forward prize, and this second collection The Green Parcel, also published by Bloodaxe (2026), was longlisted for the Forward prize for best collection. 

He has held several residencies - with the Northern Poetry Library, at the Keats Shelley House in Rome, and most recently at Seaton Delaval Hall, a National Trust property in Northumberland. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. He now teaches at York St John University. 

The Green Parcel marks a decisive widening of terrain. Where Challis’s debut The Resurrectionists was rooted in the working lives and oft ignored histories of the city, this new book turns more to the rural. The crumbling stately home of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland, farmland in Kent and even the American West lend themselves to thoughts of our relationship to the natural world and cycles of growth and decay. Subterranean in context, the poems concern themselves with a need to escape, juxtaposed with a desire to belong, and are liberally punctuated by reflections on fatherhood, ageing and loss.

The title itself is suggestive: a parcel is something owned, wrapped, passed on. Its force is sharpened by the poem of the same name where Challis treads the paths his forebears took each year, hop-picking. Travelling from polluted London to the clean air of the Kent countryside: “You can tell we’re not locals.” This uneasiness with one’s place in the world threads through the collection, “dreaming of the good life/where a green parcel of soil could be theirs for weeks.”

The phrase turns the book’s title into an image of temporary possession and temporary transformation; a small piece of earth briefly entered, worked and imagined as belonging to those who ordinarily do not own it. In the poem 'Underhouse', the narrator visits the ancestral home of the Delavals. Although the family is long gone and the walls of the house are crumbling, there’s a sense of trespassing and not having a right to be there: “I know my place”. Again, articulating what his forebears might have thought in the poem 'Courts, gardens, houses, halls' he stands, “where we never thought we’d stand.” 

The title and the themes also bring to mind a more cryptic resonance with the Hermetic saying; “as above, so below” from the ancient text The Emerald Tablet, associated with correspondences between the higher and lower worlds. The poems are drawn to things below the surface; buried histories, underground labour, family stories half known. The rural world here is not a pastoral escape, it is a working environment, a haunted estate. It is an archive underfoot, where revelation is always partial and where the act of looking carries both curiosity and risk. In the poem 'Compost Heap' there’s always something lurking ... “it would have us if it could”. 

The collection extends Challis’s existing preoccupations rather than abandoning them. There may be a moving away from the London cabbie, market porter and urban trades that shaped The Resurrectionists, but this latest collection remains deeply concerned with work; what work costs, what it preserves, what it reveals about class. Challis is good at resisting nostalgia or sentimentality. His poems recognise beauty but they also ask who has paid for it, who has been excluded from it and what kinds of labour are hidden behind its apparent ease. In 'Rapture' the class divide is exposed. New generations question the old order; the rich retreat “behind the gates/ we built for them.” And in 'Fired City' he addresses his grandmother’s generation’s experience during the bombing raids on London, a trauma inherited like a disease, “passing debris down a chain/ that hands you/ slabs of masonry/ that buried them/ in 1942.”

The collection’s underworld is therefore both literal and imaginative. Challis returns to vaults, soil, bunkers, excavations and the small dark industries of worms and roots. They do not only suggest decay but a place of storage and transformation. In 'Minor Gods', worms push though dirt “to document its moves, to subdivide/the under into old and living archives” but there is always a yearning "to find a way back to the surface". This perfectly depicts the need to meditate on what’s been discovered. Even the American folk hero Jack Sheppard wonders “would it be so bad/ to live inside the soil.” But Challis is mindful that some things are best left in the dark.

Most poems are relatively short and formal in structure but they are more than snapshots or fleeting glimpses. They hold a bold richness in their many layers.

The most affecting poems are concerned with parenthood. Their poignancy was enhanced as Challis’s little daughter flitted sprite-like amongst the bookshelves of the Newcastle Lit and Phil library at his launch reading. He writes as a new father humbled by dependency, sharpened by responsibility. These poems are brief and slim, sometimes just three words on a line. Touchingly all the poems about parenthood are written in tercets; a graceful acknowledgement to the three of them in this new family. In 'Veil' fatherhood is given an almost metaphysical charge, “the veil thins/between worlds”, the child still being half in another world. She is from the future and the past, but “when she tumbles down the rock/I am there to catch her. There is only now.” The final line of the final poem 'Wreath' is dedicated to her. When she wraps her arms around his neck, he exhorts her to “never let go.”

This collection confirms Challis as a poet alert to the pressure of place, how landscapes hold memory, class, violence, tenderness and unfinished business. As stated in the poem 'The best is still below', “so much is in the earth/…it's safer there”. 

 

John Challis, The Green Parcel, Bloodaxe, £12.99

 

Kate Boston-Williams is a poet living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She graduated with an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University in 2025. Her debut pamphlet Snake Skins was published by Dreich Press in 2023 and she has featured in poetry journals such as Clarion Quarterly, and Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, and Write Out Loud 'Echoes' anthologies