The Reluctant Radical: Identi-Kit and Uncollected Early Poems

Abstract

Farmer argues that Forrest-Thomson’s early poems represent a polemical argument for poetry and offer focused critiques of specific poetic practices. Assessing a number of Forrest-Thomson’s early poems, Farmer suggests that their hyper-self-reflexivity provide commentary on the value and veracity of poetic form. As with her later work, Farmer argues that these early poems directly engage with a range of literary-critical debates, with identity politics and with other art forms, and offer a burgeoning critique of mainstream British poetry. Farmer suggests that Forrest-Thomson’s analytical sensibility about the codes, manners and grammars of poetic production were honed in a context of radicalism that she simultaneously espoused and rejected. Farmer ends by suggesting that Forrest-Thomson’s peripheral status gave her poetry and poetic theory its particularly potent force.