Poet Gordon Challis rediscovers ‘the young me”
Poet Gordon Challis. Photo: Neil Wilson.
For the last three or four years, Golden Bay has been home to a poet of national significance and standing. Gordon Challis and his wife Penny have been living here and the landscape and flavour of the Bay have made it into Getting the music (on 91.4fm), the poem from which the title of Gordon’s latest work is taken.
His new collection, Luck of the Bounce, marks the continuation of Gordon’s literary career that began in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Wellington. At this time, when James K Baxter, Louis Johnson, Peter Bland and others were helping to develop a New Zealand poetic voice, Gordon was studying at Victoria University and writing poems.
“Louis Johnson published the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook and, on a few occasions, he selected some of my poems,” said Gordon. “He was a very perceptive and encouraging editor – and a fine poet. I felt as though I was getting somewhere with my work.”
In 1963 Gordon’s first collection, Building, was published, but it was followed by a lengthy silence while he pursued his career.
“When I finished my degree, I went to work in the mental health system as a psychologist and social worker,” said Gordon. “I found the work all-consuming. The immensity of the need made things very difficult. At one time I was working in the hospital at Porirua and there were just two social workers—myself and one other. Then the other one left and I was on my own, dealing with ‘the human stuff’ associated with mental health care.”
After working in hospitals and clinics in New Zealand and Australia, Gordon retired in 1989 and he found to his surprise that writing slowly began returning to him. He had new work published in The Listener and Landfall. In 2003 he published his second collection, The other side of the brain. It was well received, critics praising the poems’ “real power” and “touches of wry humour”.
The poems in Luck of the Bounce are sometimes light and quirky, often witty, occasionally self-deprecating but always compassionate. There is a deep humanity in Gordon’s creative impulse. There is a satirical edge to some of the humour, but Gordon says it is never his intention to hurt people.
“The work is going to be enjoyed, or not, according to the reader’s own tastes, experiences and vision of what we’re doing here,” he said. “Luck of the Bounce is definitely part of a progression in my work. The poems are lighter and more humorous. Humour can do a lot, as long as it’s not too deliberate. My earlier works were news stories from the unconscious mind but these latest ones are news stories from a more conscious kind of awareness.”
So what is it that Gordon finds so compelling about poetry? “The intensity of its reflection and its ability to make connections with an audience in its endeavours to fathom the human condition,” he responded.
Now 76, Gordon says he likes the way his recent work has “the young me” in it. “I like the resilience of childhood,” he said. “I think I have that ability to spring back. The poems are quite sparky, with the keenness of feeling that young people have.”
Gordon will be giving Luck of the Bounce ($19.99 Steele Roberts Publishers) its Golden Bay launch next Saturday 18 April at the Takaka Memorial Library.
Neil Wilson
Getting the music (on 91.4FM)
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 it.
The dipole rooftop aerial’s outspread arms
gather in the gifts;
a metronome
- the pulsed electric fence –
keeps time.
The cattle are quiet
do not touch the fence.
At times they stand very still
at times, before rain, they are lying down;
Then it doesn’t rain –
so what do they know?
They know it does rain a lot round here
they know how the hill
gets often in the way of weather
but can’t stop everything.
Gordon Challis
