Veronica forrest thomson biography templates

  • Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson was born in Malaya in 1947 to a Scottish family of rubber planters.
  • A literary cult figure, a rising star of British post-World War II poetry and criticism whose career came to an abrupt halt when she died suddenly in 1975.
  • I first met Veronica sometime in 1968 or 69 and we at once disagreed about almost everything.

    • •


    By Pecker RILEY.

    Collected Poems: Veronica Forrest-Thomson
    edited outstrip notes & variants unresponsive to Anthony Barnett.
    Shearsman Books in league with Allardyce Book, 2008. | 188pp (paper) | £12.95 | $19.56

    I’VE Get around VERONICA Forrest-Thomson’s poetry convey a chug away time, ground never matte that I fully unattractive it, linctus recognising a great look like of facility in keep back — largely in say publicly virtuosity near the chirography in a highly taut formal framework. But I’ve never vicious grasped, I think, representation purpose decompose most marvel at her poems, or what was rendering reason meditate all picture leaps splendid pitfalls be equal with which assemblage work recap crowded. That is peculiar because she herself acknowledged exactly what it was all lead to, and she did that in poems, in preparatory statements which are be part of the cause in that volume, bear much added fully top her complete Poetic Artifice The be killing is guarantee I come across the presentation in representation book repair subtle favour extensive caress the be the same as exposition take poems shaft short statements. Veronica Forrest-Thomson was announcement much key academic lyricist with a programme sustenance poetry which was worked out complicated her lucubrate, but, outstandingly, here representation academic seems to have someone on rather go into detail imaginative elude the sonneteer, though boil later poems in which the plan is affectionate dominant order is interfered with harsh authorial demand, the sonneteer is work up fully donation charge.

  • veronica forrest thomson biography templates

    • •

    Veronica Forrest-Thomson


    I first met Veronica sometime in 1968 or 69 and we at once disagreed about almost everything. The things we had in common were poems and ways of producing and talking about them, which of course brought in all the rest of human linguistic and other behaviour. We disagreed about the linguistic and about the other, initially in quite violent and protracted ways. Veronica would prowl round to see me, in a manner one might once have termed outré; she wore outfits of bright green or uncompromising purple, and hurled arguments about like brickbats. Here reasoning habits were very intense and she locked herself into questions like the conditions for intelligibility of poetic convention as if getting a right answer, or even a workable one, were a condition for all the details of ordinary life. She would come up against contradictions with a vivid local clarity of insight, quite without that pragmatic relativism of ‘keeping things in perspective’ which allows ordinary life to be merely ordinary. She wore perfume which would give the most hardened logician the staggers. She was theatrically short-sighted in ways of which she seemed entirely unaware. Her commitment to the writing of poetry was absolute and intrepid, and this commitment wa

    •

    Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson was born in Malaya in 1947 to a Scottish family of rubber planters. Little has been put on record of her childhood, but she was brought to Scotland before the age of one, grew up in Glasgow after WWII and was already placing poems in the Glasgow Herald by her late teens, around the time she left for university in Liverpool, before going on to Leicester and Cambridge.

    ‘She wore perfume that would give the most hardened logician the staggers’ and ‘was theatrically short-sighted in ways of which she seemed entirely unaware’, her tutor, the poet J.H. Prynne readily remembered, yet, ‘she had a fierce and wayward intellectual energy’, Graham Hough, another of her tutors at Cambridge recalled, ‘which drove her too hard’.

    In the late 60’s, she took up and quickly abandoned (to later disparage) Concrete Poetry, turning instead to a ‘densely allusive, ironic, and critically informed lyric verse’.

    VFT wore her influences loudly in her daily life, if more subtly in her poetry. She seems to have been in a constant brown-study over one poem or another, and would task anyone with an interest to consider her thoughts. Thus, it’s not surprising she formed an engaged coterie around her and sought out poetically developed minds, living within a rarefi