The Green Parcel and Against Falling Book Launch
Linda Anderson’s Against Falling and John Challis’s The Green Parcel book launch review, 17th June 2026.
A conversation between Jenni Hampshire and Rose Schierig (abridged version - full audio available).
JH: So, we are here to talk about the launch we went to for John Challis’ book The Green Parcel and Linda Anderson's Against Falling. We'll start with The Green Parcel and ‘Cathedral’.
From now on,
god will be the one
in need of us.
Screaming
little god passed
from breast
to arm to breast,
asleep wherever
sleep begins,
red cheeked, barely
dressed, attuned
to any movement,
then up again
in tears, demanding
arms to fall asleep in.
We stand above,
tall and dark
at any hour,
alert as towers,
at the birthplace
of our faith.
This is a lovely, skinny little poem. Lots of the lines are only three or four words long.
RS: So why was it that one in particular that you chose to read?
JH: The parenting poems in John’s book all have this quality of being very slender and the impression it conveys is one of delicacy. A sort of vigilance and care and carefulness. Every word is carefully chosen, carefully placed. And it has, to me, that sense of being somewhat shell-shocked at the responsibility of parenthood.
RS: John said something interesting about how the parenting poems came to this form.
JH: Yes, that he'd gone into it thinking that perhaps these poems about being a dad would be more prosy. But in the end, they ended up in this shape.
RS: He also touched on a sequence of poems about with his grandmother. He said that they were bittersweet and they came out of learning about someone's life just before you lose them: “an attempt to find a story that I never really knew.”
JH: Which is interesting, isn't it? As people who are studying poetry, I think one of the things that you learn quite quickly is how a poem can say very true things whilst not being factually true at all.
RS: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes the truth isn't the best way to tell the truth.
JH: There's so much stuff under the surface in these poems. Sometimes literally, poems about excavation, archeology. One of my favourites is ‘Minor Gods’ which is about worms, essentially.
RS: What I really like is the shape of this poem. It’s a solid, soily, block of text.
JH: The poetry here feels like a work of excavation, but with an honouring of the fact that some stuff is better left untouched. Or perhaps that you can't get at it and so you need to get at it in a different way.
RS: Digging into it, towards it.
JH: But very carefully. Reverentially almost. I should say, they were both wonderful speakers.
RS: Yes. So we also have Linda Anderson’s book Against Falling, which is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. I'm going to read ‘Bark’.
I woke from a dream with the word bark in my head,
a memory without narrative or context. I sensed it
as I might have sensed the presence of someone I love.
Fissures and crevices were deeply scored into dead cell,
and lichen’s brittle curls hovered like grace notes over it.
A texture of entrances; skin covering sap and heartwood,
all growing and dying in the same moment.
It was with me all day, an after image I
could not shake, nor wanted to. Just three days before,
we'd left you in a treeless place. Our pilgrimage
then, into grey morning, the dead end of words. And
this is the dream that you should come back as wood,
as tree. That there are words. A conversation continuing
JH: And no full stop after “continuing.”
RS: No full stop. Very important for that last line. The conversation continuing and the poem continues by not ending itself.
JH: Yes, gorgeous. And also, “skin covering sap and heartwood”?
RS: Stop it.
JH: Beautiful.
RS: I chose this one because it has some of the things in it that the collection as a whole is preoccupied with. The dreaminess, the time, the texture. The afterimage is a very important thing. These poems are in-betweens. Linda said there's this thought of short stories as being like poems, but she wanted to try and write poems like short stories; dealing with how time is organised within them. ‘Garden’ has this sense that time is unsteady. It's moving, happening, already happened, going to come.
JH: Which feels truthful to how we experience time. The way memories come back to you or sometimes you even imagine things forwards in a way that feels like they have already happened. Experience is not as linear as we imagine. And certainly not as linear as it is in the retelling to somebody else. Poems such as ‘Garden’ do such a good job of capturing and compressing timelines.
RS: Absolutely. It’s very expansive. There's a sense that you don't know that this has happened yet, but it's going to happen to you. The speaker knows that and the figure is going to come to know that. So it's a balancing act. You're at a precipice, a cliff's edge.
JH: In the book, there are a couple of sections which are almost like personal essays. Notebook 1, notebook 2. Linda described them as being sort of prose poems, sort of essays.
RS: They punctuate the collection. I really like the notebooks, you can't really put them into one category. “Inside everything I write, there is another lost poem.” They are in-between things.
Here on the next page: “think how nothing is missing from the fragment.” The fragment is a whole. Even though it's a fragment of something bigger, it is also its own contained whole as well. Can you really remember a memory?
JH: Every time you remember it, you're changing it. Every time you tell it.
RS: Absolutely. Well, this is the first time we've done an event review. Thank you so much for listening (or reading) and thank you so much John Challis, Linda Anderson, and Jenni.
JH: And Rose!
RS: Bye Jenni.
JH: See you next time.
