Books

Available in Spring 2026!

The Orphans and other poems

The Orphans and other poems is James Warner’s first published collection, gathering together his best from the two decades between 1990 and 2010 and introducing to a wider audience the work of an independent voice in Canadian poetry. 

Included here are the striking shorter poems of exploration and invention many of which have appeared in literary magazines throughout Canada and abroad. Formally various and open to diverse places and change – from the forests of Nova Scotia to New York City, from Babylon to the Black Sea – they draw on poetry’s unique capacity to reflect, in the same instance, our inmost and our communal experience.

 Also included are two longer works, here published for the first time. ‘Love’s Noon’, a mystical romance in twelve brief parts, powerfully condenses to its essential elements one of the origin myths of what Denis de Rougemont called ‘Love in the Western World’. And, very different – evoking the spirit of place in its comic dimension – the title poem ‘The Orphans’ unfolds as a tour de force of propulsive regional delirium, in 77 blank-verse sestets.

In engaging, musical poems, grounded in the actual – the ever new – this wide-ranging collection finally has its say.