These are the Things we Have Lost

'...I've learned/ There are some things you can fake:/ Blondeness, wit, intelligence: / Marriage.'

In her debut poetry collection, These Are the Things We Have Lost, Janice Warman chronicles a journey from her South African childhood to the landscapes of motherhood with unflinching honesty. From pregnancy 'high on hormones and Pellegrino', to second weddings, these poems capture intimate moments of love and loss.

With a journalist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Warman's voice moves between continents and decades. A celebration of life's joys and an elegy for what inevitably slips through our grasp.

'An absorbing series of poems about loss and family, facing unflinchingly what one poem calls 'All the little stations of my loss.' Warman has the rare gift of expressing pain and suffering, with rage at death and disease and the irretrievability of the past, and yet remaining life-enhancing: a positivity that comes about through verbal life and descriptive richness in poems like 'Spider Web'. To care so eloquently about loss and suffering is to exalt their opposites by implication. This is an outstanding and compelling book.'

• Bernard O'Donoghue, Author of 'Farmers Cross' (Faber, 2011), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize

'Janice Warman's voice is at once arresting and assured in these compelling poems about family and childhood, abuse and loss, as well as love and renewal. A powerful debut that packs a punch, offers redemption, love and, ultimately, hope.'

• Mara Bergman, Poet and Author of 'The Disappearing Room' and 'The Night We Were Dylan Thomas' (Arc Publications)