His work was widely published in literary periodicals, especially Landfall, and in 1960 Charles Brasch nominated him as one of the four leading contenders for poetic fame in New Zealand in the coming decade.
[4] Challis's work has been linked with Louis Johnson (the most influential), Peter Bland and Charles Doyle, all three immigrant English poets writing in Wellington from the mid-1950s.
[3] 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".
For example, the poem "Getting the music (on 91.4FM)" begins: Living under the hill you have to take /the luck of the bounce – /the diffractive spray from waves clipping /just the right rocks.
[4] But he retained his interest in more fundamental matters as he engaged in poetry because of its "intensity of its reflection and its ability to make connections with an audience in its endeavours to fathom the human condition".