Vestigial: poems after Alasdair Gray’s Lanark

Vestigial: poems after Alasdair Gray’s Lanark
Juana Adcock

Juana Adcock’s Vestigial: poems after Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is among the lasting bounties commissioned by ‘Making Imagined Objects: The 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference’, hosted in Glasgow in 2022. Adcock is an impressive choice for the commission: like Gray, her work playfully twists tradition and myth into strange modern shapes. Moreover, as Gray’s writing often traverses those liminal spaces between imagined and ‘real’ realities, so too is Adcock’s poetry one of traversing—in terms of psychology and physicality, but also in terms of form and language. See, for example, how the eye traverses the page in the opening poem:

as a paper bird
a letter that j o u r n e y e d
t h r o u g h t h e n i g h t ’ s u p r o a r

That ‘paper bird’ is ‘the way you used to laugh with joy / upon seeing me’, an elegiac invocation of human contact transformed into a text that cannot be contained by conventional syntax. Elsewhere, triangle brackets in ‘My chi moves like arrows’ become the arrows themselves that modulate the energy (or ‘chi’) of our reading, and ‘After Eden’ appends every line with a footnote, creating a parallel poem in the bottom-margin (a device Gray himself would have surely appreciated).

It is testament to the intellectual and emotional depth of the poems that these devices never feel like gimmicks, nor do they exist to make the poems more ‘difficult’. On the contrary, and much like Gray’s narrative tricks in Lanark, the appeal of these innovations is immediate, and stimulates interpretation. To this end the title, Vestigial, whose various definitions we meet throughout provides a thread—and as the word implies, it is one above all of elegy. The superimposed worlds of Glasgow/Unthank prove a fitting shadow-metaphor for Adcock’s lockdown Glasgow:

Reaching out to each other over the distance specified
by new government guidelines holding onto ancient memories of
bridges, the gaps between arms wrapped around our own
bodies, eyes shut to emulate closeness. [...]

The absences in the sequence are several: a departed lover; an unsaved document; a harmonium, to name but a few. But these are not, after all, absences at all, but ‘vestiges from another world’—or perhaps, again, that ‘paper bird’. It is in this lyrical and tactile recognition that the final virtue of the sequence lies, and in so doing contributes not only to Adcock’s already compelling body of work, but also to the poetics and psychogeography of Glasgow, in all its present and vestigial dimensions.

—Calum Rodger