Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–1975) grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, and later taught at the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham. She was both a poet and a critical theorist, and 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 committed suicide in 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