New Release Books by Gareth Farmer

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson’s relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson’s work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson’s published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson’s writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.

These poems were part of a (semi-)daily poetry project written between the 27th November 2015 to May 31st 2016. Most of the poems in this sequence were written in part-response to particular reading materials which are listed at the bottom of the individual poems. The phrase ''strategic forms'' is inspired by Caroline Levine''s development of her practice of what she calls ''Strategic Formalism'' outlined most comprehensively in her Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015).