Books
Available in Summer 2026!
Welcome Fog
Open to discovery and with fresh subject matter, Welcome Fog is James Warner’s second collection of poems, a book of nuanced reckonings, ‘endings, and beginnings’, occasioned by mid-life change.
In brief vignettes of urban Nova Scotia life, and in meditations set on the province’s rural ‘untrafficked’ eastern shore, on the edge of wilderness Atlantic, readers may recognize themselves in ‘the fabulous remains’ – in memorable details of abidance and flux.
And so too in the incisive and formally various poems here celebrating travel, its pleasures, and capacity for confounding us. In the encounter with an elsewhere, in evocations of Berlin, and Shanghai, and an avant-garde New York, the spirit of inquiry has its own ball in play, with its question, Why are we here?
Whether we find ourselves in the thickets of technology’s rise, subject to ‘the verdicts of money’, or ‘among the reprieved’ or, at last, belatedly setting out into the unknown, the poems in Welcome Fog write us all in it together: awakening to possibilities, in ‘this mesmerizing magic show, still on’.
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.
Makeless / ‘meɪklɪs/ a. ME. 1 Without an equal; matchless, peerless. Archaic. E13. 2 Without a mate; widowed. Obsolete. M15. 3 tranf. & fig. Self-luminous; nondual. Rare. E21.
Makeless / ‘meɪklɪs/ a. ME. 1 Without an equal; matchless, peerless. Archaic. E13. 2 Without a mate; widowed. Obsolete. M15. 3tranf. & fig. Self-luminous; nondual. Rare. E21.