These are the Things we Have Lost

'Sometimes fierce, often fragile, Warman peels back the wallpaper and deftly fills the cracks in real life with twinkling notes that vibrate around the reader as they travel with her from blushing vicars to birdsong. These are the Things we have Lost is a mighty promising debut collection that offers a treasure trove of finely-crafted insight and Warman is definitely one to watch.' - Tessa Foley

'That the depredation of Alzheimer’s is conceived in the mother figure’s own hand, presumably in an early, lucid moment, lends the otherwise fulsome scene the sharpest of ironies.' - The Yorkshire Times

'These are poems at the still centre of a hurricane. Around them whirl leavings, regrets, illnesses, aging, longing, loss. Through all this, Janice Warman’s eye never loses its focus on what matters: truth, simply and directly held and told.' - Rishi Dastidar

'An afterword reveals that a few of the poems in Janice Warman’s impressive debut, These are the things we have lost (Fly on the Wall, £11.99), were written while horseriding in East Sussex. She can be far from bucolic, however; “I am a repository / for the fist” (“Body Blow”), while “Mugabe” identifies tyrants who can just as easily live in a “semi-detached in Leeds”. “Ballet” observes tartly that “there are some things you can fake: / Blondeness, wit, intelligence . . . Ballet isn’t one of them.” Other poems deal with the death of a mother (“so little and lost / in that big cherrywood box”), and, in the title poem, the decline of a difficult father, no less a loss for being a relief. Here artfulness doesn’t impede accessibility.' - Suzi Feay, The Financial Times