Posts By: John Challis
Review: ‘The Built Environment’ by Emily Hasler
Epigraphs often function as concise statements of intent, subtly staking out the territory and interests of a collection. Emily Hasler’s The Built Environment (Liverpool University Press) begins with a quote from Nan Shepard’s The Living Mountain acknowledging the wonderful tension between what we know and what we cannot know of the natural world, which for Shepard…
John Challis
Review: ‘Kingdom of Gravity’ by Nick Makoha
Kingdom of Gravity is a powerful debut and deserves a wide readership. Nick Makoha’s reflections on Idi Amin’s brutal rule in Uganda and the equally atrocious civil war that ousted him, which indirectly answer reoccurring atrocities in Syria and the Middle East, are the work of a hugely talented poet, capable of great formal finesse…
John Challis
Review: ‘Alarum’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith
Whilst reviewing Wayne Holloway-Smith’s debut Alarum (Bloodaxe Books), I found myself reading sections aloud to friends in the pub, partly because Alarum is enviably good, but also because I couldn’t quite get my head around it. Hilarious and witty, it’s also terrifically sad, but wears its tragedy so lightly at first it’s hard to notice. ‘Doo-wop’,…
John Challis
Actor and spectator: poetry, film, and the paradox of viewing
The history of film could almost be divided into two obsessions: one with narrative and storytelling, the other with experimentation. My upcoming online course, Frame, Shot, Scene, Sequence: Powering Poetry Through Film, will explore how both modes can offer a vast array of opportunities to poets. Since the emergence of film in the late 19th…
John Challis
Review: ‘The Fetch’ by Gregory Leadbetter
How do the dead function in poems? In Gregory Leadbetter’s quietly stunning debut The Fetch, the dead appear as echoes in the form of many ‘fetches’ – the apparition or double of a living person, usually an omen for impending death – that quietly haunt throughout. The collection’s title poem begins suitably with noises in…
John Challis
Review: ‘Noir’ by Charlotte Gann
Charlotte Gann’s debut poetry collection is filled with dark and anxious poems that aren’t afraid to leave their often-worrying situations unresolved. Noir is a tightly woven collection of half-told narratives, which leave room for the reader’s imagination. The opening poem, ‘Puzzle’, reveals, manifesto-like, the intentions of the book: If I look closely I can…
John Challis
YOU, The Movie – Horror, Western, Romance, Noir and Disaster Poetry
How many films have you watched? Ten? A hundred? I imagine the figure is likely to be in the thousands. All those Sunday afternoon matinees, those trips to the cinema, the Shakespeare remakes shown in class, the teatime classics, the 10pm premieres, and the hours spent on Netflix binges certainly add up. I bet you…
John ChallisThe Poem Noir
Watched any of these TV shows lately – The Killing, The Bridge, Luther, or Breaking Bad? Or any of the following films – The Dark Knight, Black Swan, or Drive? If you have, then chances are you’ve already come across a version of film noir. Films noir, at their most cliché, are films about ordinary…
John Challis