The Green Parcel

by John Challis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780377698
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	08/25/2026
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

'In John Challis’s superb first collection, the past has not finished with us. It pursues and provokes and questions what we’re 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, on The Resurrectionists

‘Many of the poems in The Resurrectionists by John Challis are situated in the City of London, the West End and East London/Essex borderlands – my own home turf, until recently. These poems are rooted in relationships with family often departed, with old trades and night trading. The cover is brilliant, a photo of men at work in Smithfield’s market. Many poems offer us what this image does: a direct gaze, wit, labour, ghosts and dead meat. The real narrative of a city is not in its architecture, transport, incarcerations or commerce (although all those are here too) but in the flesh and blood – the workers. These are incredibly well-tailored poems, with humanity that acknowledges men’s fears and their cousin vulnerabilities. – Jane Wilkinson, Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)

'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, best recent poetry

From the Publisher