Gordon Challis: Difference between revisions

(1932–), poet, was born in a Welsh family in Birmingham, England, and raised there and in Sydney. After living for a time in Spain, he arrived in New Zealand in 1953 and worked as a postman in Wellington and studied psychology and social work at Victoria University. After working as a psychiatric social worker in Porirua Hospital 1961–62, he joined the new Hastings psychiatric unit as a psychologist. He returned to psychiatric social work in 1973, at Canberra, and retired from it in 1988, at Porirua. He lives in Nelson.

Challis began writing poetry at Victoria University. His work was widely published in literary periodicals, especially Landfall, and in 1960 Charles Brasch nominated him as one of the four leading contenders for poetic fame in New Zealand in the coming decade. A poetic sequence, The Oracle, was published in Landfall 60 (1961), the first poem of which subsequently appeared in Challis's collection, Building (Caxton, 1963). The intense pressures of mental health work led Challis to abandon writing poetry and, apart from translations from Spanish for Landfall, no further poetry appeared until several new poems in the NZ Listener in the late 1980s. A second collection is in preparation.

Challis's work has been linked with the other ‘immigrant’ poets writing in Wellington from the mid-1950s, Peter Bland and Charles Doyle. All three were regarded as being in the ‘School of [Louis] Johnson’—that is, dealing with personal experience in a contemporary urban, often domestic, setting, and using modernist techniques. Challis's most enduring work is more distinctive. Such poems as ‘The Iceman’, ‘The Shadowless Man’, ‘The Thermostatic Man’, ‘The Asbestos-Suited Man in Hell’ and its sequel ‘The Inflammable Man’ explore psychological states and the development of personal identity. Others such as ‘The Black One’, ‘The Sirens’ and ‘The Oracle’ are an often ironic reworking of myths or archetypes into contemporary situations. Linguistically inventive yet always carefully crafted, Challis's poetry is characterised by an apparent distance, almost a clinical detachment, which subverts the immediate or expected emotional response. Beneath that, however, there is a deeper identification with psychological conditions that are unique to the individual yet common to humankind. The poems listed above have all been anthologised, some several times.