Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson (28 November 1947 – 26 April 1975) was a poet and a critical theorist.

Born in Malaya to rubber planter John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean (Veronica hyphenated the surname herself, having originally published under the name Veronica Forrest), she grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, and later taught at the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham. Her critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was published by Manchester University Press in 1978. 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 in association with Allardyce Book.

Forrest-Thomson died 26 April 1975 at the age of 27.

Further reading

• Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (2000)
• Jane Dowson & Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-century British Women's Poetry (2005)
• Alison Mark, "Poetic Relations and Related Poetics: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Charles Bernstein" in Romana Huk (ed.), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (2003)
• Alison Mark, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (2001)
• Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems and Translations (1990)
• Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-century Poetry (1978)

External links

• Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Five poems
• Brian Kim Stefans, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and High Artifice
• Peter Robinson, A review of On the Periphery
• James Keery, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and the Levels of Artifice: Veronica Forrest-Thomson on J H Prynne
• Kenyon Review Online Web Feature