Collected Poems

by Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Poetry. Edited by Anthony Barnett. This volume brings back into print the complete poems of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975), whose work remains a touchstone for those interested in radical poetry in the 1970s. The book contains all of her published collections, plus poems that remained in manuscript, and contains work that has come to light since the publication of the Collected Poems and Translations (Allardyce, Barnett, 1990) as well as a number of corrections to the first edition.

Genres: Poetry

188 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2008

About the author

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.

Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.

She studied at the University of Liverpool (BA, 1967) and Girton College, Cambridge (PhD, 1971) where her first supervisor was the poet J.H. Prynne. Her Cambridge friends included the poets Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley.

Forrest-Thomson later taught at the universities of Leicester and Birmingham.

Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), the award-winning Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Subsequent gatherings of her work include Collected Poems and Translations (1990) and Selected Poems (1999). A further Collected Poems, minus the translations, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books with Allardyce Books.

Forrest-Thomson was married to the writer and academic Jonathan Culler from 1971 to 1974. She died in her sleep on 26 April 1975 at the age of 27, after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Reviews

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

As one is conventionally supposed to (or, excuse the pun, according to some language game), these language-games with language and philosophy of language were great fun. Besides enjoyment aspects also some of the most ingenious pieces. Can't believe she is hardly every mentioned (or can I, patriarchy).

Especially loved when she combines (up to 4!!) languages in a poem in a manner that show VFT's proficiency and moreover, her ability to wield poetry cross-linguistically.

Inspirational, original, charged with philosophy and self-consciousness, blowing up boundaries set by its own genre - this calls for another postgrad degree.

Big love and thanks to Kate for lending it to me! <33

[kate]

OBSESSED yes yes yes yes yes yes yes everything yes brilliant loved loved loved !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank you cas!!!!!!!!

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book with a fairly specialised audience - ideally, a reader would know something about literature, something about philosophy, something about what it's like to be a woman in academia, and at least a bit of several European languages. I am pretty close to, but not quite in, that ideal audience. I bought it because of the references to Wittgenstein she uses, which are indeed good and interesting, but I found that the poems about literature (often with Wittgenstein's ideas in the background) often work better as poems. The whole thing is deeply intertextual; to go further with it, one would probably need a small study group, or at least to spend a good deal of time tracking down references!