108:, certain poems ("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 in that first collection ("The Black One", "The Sirens" and "The Oracle") are an often ironic reworking of myths or archetypes into contemporary situations. The poems are all "linguistically inventive" but "carefully crafted". Challis's poetry published in the twentieth century 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".
76:(Caxton, 1963). The intense pressures of mental health work led Challis to abandon writing poetry and, apart from translations from Spanish for Landfall, he published no poetry. After his retirement from mental health care, Challis found "to his surprise" that writing slowly began returning to him. He had new work published in The
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as "part of a progression in his work" with the poems being lighter and more humorous. His earlier works were "news stories from the unconscious mind" but in his third collection they were "news stories from a more conscious kind of awareness" with direct references to local and everyday life . For
115:(2009), the poems became "sometimes light and quirky, often witty, occasionally self-deprecating but always compassionate". There was a satirical edge to some of the humour, but (in Challis's words) "never his intention to hurt people". He described
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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,
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from the mid-1950s. These poets dealt with personal experience in a contemporary urban, often domestic, setting, and using modernist techniques. Andrew Mason see
Challis's most enduring work as more distinctive than the work of those poets. In
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Challis 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
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Living under the hill you have to take /the luck of the bounce – /the diffractive spray from waves clipping /just the right rocks. /This is Upper Takaka /this is Golden Bay /twice as far from Nelson /as Nelson is from
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Challis began writing poetry at
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Andrew Mason, "Challis, Gordon", in Roger
Robinson and Nelson Wattie (eds),
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Neil, Wilson, "Poet Gordon
Challis rediscovers 'the young me'”,
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and
Charles Doyle, all three immigrant English poets writing in
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and
Landfall. In 2003 Challis published his second collection,
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example, the poem "Getting the music (on 91.4FM)" begins:
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22:(3 July 1932 – 2 March 2018) was a New Zealand poet.
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20:Cecil Gordon Challis
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26:Background
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