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If Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Roland Barthes ever met, her papers do not record it. Certainly he visited Cambridge in the 1960s, but there is no evidence she saw him speak. Nor is there any evidence she read the translations of Writing Degree Zero (1967) and Elements of Semiology (1968) published by Jonathan Cape, which seems odd given her interest in his French publications, but she seems to have preferred to read Barthes in the original. In this preference, she differs from most of the poets we will meet in this book, and it also partly accounts for her idiosyncratic approach to Barthes's oeuvre. While we would expect her to engage with prominent texts like S/Z and Mythologies, she names a poem after the relatively obscure essay ‘The Reality-Effect’, and also engages with ‘Linguistics and Literature’, which is the first publication to outline (after a fashion) one of Barthes’s major ideas, the ‘readerly’/‘writerly’ distinction, but was not published in English until 2015. As we shall explore in this first chapter, ‘Forrest- Thomson's Barthes’ is sometimes familiar but at others quite a different thinker, whom we have now lost. Looking at Forrest-Thomson's poetry and prose from this angle can bring him back for us, as well as illuminating her complex and challenging work.
Brought up in Glasgow, Forrest-Thomson likely acquired her excellent French as a pupil at St Bride's School in nearby Helensburgh, and also had one of her earliest personal encounters with another Glaswegian poet, Edwin Morgan, with whom she struck up a correspondence as a teenager. It was he and Peter Porter who as judges rescued her Language-Games (1971) from the ‘slush pile’ of the New Poets Award at the University of Leeds, unsatisfied with the shortlist they had been given, and after her death he dedicated the moving sequence ‘Unfinished Poems’ to her, collected in his 1977 book The New Divan. Forrest-Thomson's work often resembles Porter's in its formal eclecticism, ranging from the ostentatiously experimental (her ‘Variations on Sappho’, his ‘Lévi-Strauss at the Lie-Detector’ and ‘Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath’) to traditional metrical forms (her ‘Sonnet’ and ‘Canzon’, his ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ and Sonnets from Scotland).
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