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Veronica Forrest-Thomson: A Retrospective |

Contours—Homage to Cézanne

Pattern, like a magnetic field,
is passionate in restraint; limits compress
significance; framed energy is sealed.
Objects, having nothing to express

except themselves, attain intensity
in assumed balance, which alleges,
in face of our amorphous liberty,
the joy of everything with edges.

But these tight contours owe
shape and definition to the eye
of inessential man who

from complication learns to simplify,
fuse form with what alone forms cannot show,
and in this act becomes as sure as they.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson
Veronica Forrest-Thomson was the author of three poetry collections and the influential critical work Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry.