A poetic memoir from an award-winning journalist tracing love, loss and the truths we dare to speak.

Book blurb

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.

My thoughts

Moving through her life in South Africa to East Sussex Janice Warman brings a new, tender poetry collection which chronicles her journey physically and emotionally it explores themes such as feminism, justice, gender based violence, apartheid, friendship between women, birth, loss and grief.

Here are just a couple of the poems that I particularly enjoyed

“I’ve made a list of things for you to worry about

says my mother, and I listen, and laugh, and tell her that before she rang I was fine, thanks very much, and somehow it makes me love her more, …”

Janice Warman

This is a poem which for me perfectly captures that to and fro that a warm and loving mother, daughter relationship can, that allows for the humour to bubble up and warmth to fill your heart. It allows for those personal moments in your own life to flood in and bring memories to relish.

“She went before I could say goodbye” another poem that allows personal thoughts yet says something more in this instance of circumstances that trapped a life yearning to be free and perhaps this has a certain amount of truth in all relationships yet, within the body of this anthology, it implies a certain darkness which continues or is explained in “Dad is in the hospital”, “Flying in” and the title poem “These are the things that are lost”.

“Madeleine … For Gail”

It’s a hard thing, to put your friend in the ground.

Janice Warman

This a beautiful poem about friendship and loss a subject that does, of course, run through this anthology alongside others with a careful and tender hand. It allows for the deep sadness of grief to be felt whilst still recalling moments of humour, of what that friendship was, what it meant.

I very much enjoyed reading this anthology which was both fascinating and engaging. The author writes of those things that she has experienced with tenderness, honesty and relatability.

Book: eARC provided by Fly On The Wall Press | Purchased*

Thanks

Many thanks to Isabelle from Fly On The Wall Press who sent me an eCopy of These Are the Things We Have Lost and I am delighted to have read and shared my thoughts on it.

I came across a copy* of These Are the Things We Have Lost in Waterstones and couldn’t resist buying it. Not the best of photos but it really is a gorgeous thing on the outside as well and inside.

#20BOS26

You can read all about the #20BOS challenge on Annabel’s blog at AnnaBookBel. Annabel has taken sole charge of this challenge in 2026 having been co-host with Emma Words and Peace in 2025 after taking over the challenge from Cathy @ 746books.

Information

Published: Fly On The Wall Press | 12 January 2026 | 86 pp| ISBN PBK:9781915789525

Buy: Fly On The Wall Press | Amazon | Hive | Bookshop.org (affiliate link) | Your local library | Your local bookshop

Author: Janice Warman is an award-winning writer of YA fiction, non-fiction and poetry, financial journalist, and a creative writing tutor at Share Community for disabled adults, based in East Sussex. Her poetry has been published in magazines in the UK and South Africa, in The Hey Nonny Handbook, the women’s literary survival guide (Harriman House), in Ballet, a poetic and photographic tribute to her mother (Susakpress/Spiralbound) and in English textbooks in South Africa. She is a past winner of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Folio Competition. Now Vice-chair, she has been a member of the Society for 35 years.

“Growing up in apartheid South Africa affected me profoundly; this world has fed into my work as a journalist, non-fiction and Young Adult writer, but has never penetrated more deeply than into my poetry. Being a feminist in a country that was inherently violent towards women, particularly black women – birthing and growing your own children and how that takes you back to your own childhood in that faraway place – grieving your mother while she is still alive and suffering with dementia thousands of miles away. Poetry is the means by which I write most deeply and passionately about my real life, the life that runs below my work life like an underground river. The things that demand that I take up my pen.”

Janice Warman

Books

The World Beneath | The Class of ‘79: three students who risked their lives to destroy apartheid