'Veronica - Some teenage poems (16)'. Contains typescript poems written between the ages of 13 and 18. Poems: ‘Solipsism’, ‘Ultimas’, ‘Il faut’, ‘What ?’, ‘Image of Art’, ‘Garden Incident in Autumn’, ‘Chinese Characters in Autumn’, ‘Accident’, ‘Oida’, ‘Nescio’, ‘Continuity’, ‘Birth Certificate’, ‘Trees (untitled)’, ‘Dead Day’, ‘Time’s Fool’, ‘In the Midst of Life, etc.’ 7pp.
[Note by Gareth Farmer 2013: It had been believed that this set of poems had been destroyed. G F had previously seen only a photocopy of this document - with additional, handwritten poems not contained here - supplied by the editor of the Collected and Selected Poems, Anthony Barnett. However, as this collection of the poems illustrates, Jonathan Culler had the original of this document on file from the mid-1970s. The presence of the handwriting of V F-T’s mother, Jean Forrest Thomson, throughout the document implies that she assembled the poems, presumably after V F-T’s death. Her editing activity is fairly extensive: she has given the poems their collected title - ‘Veronica - Some teenage poems’ -, inserted page numbers, put age of composition next to the poems and translated titles using foreign words. She also provides footnotes to the final poem of the collection, ‘In the Midst of Life etc.’ Referring to the line ‘Therefore I, perhaps about to die’, she writes: 'I know this is only a casual reference to the smoky atmosphere in the bus but awful to read again - now. As is the ALKA SELTZER poem in her LANGUAGE-GAMES book - 'Inert liquid and undissolved tablets are dangerous'. She had thought so much about 'patterns' in life, determinism etc. We used to have such deep discussions - someday I may tell you of our last talk on the telephone - only a few hours before it happened.'