How can we conceptualize care, resilience, and regional pride in communities where the needs of residents conflict with the physical landscape? In his review of Glasgoscopy, a poetry collection by Glasgow-based OT Vicki Husband, Craig Lamont examines the potential of poetic language to illuminate Husband’s experience of the city and its people.
Glasgoscopy, Vicki Husband declares, is a book ‘about being a brief guest in many lives’ (jacket blurb). Having worked as an Occupational Therapist (OT) for over 25 years, Husband’s poetry collection is the accumulation of so many of these brief encounters, stitched together with quiet and patient precision. The effect is that we do not peer into these lives over the poet’s shoulder, but somehow assume the necessary, professional respect that Husband has developed during her career. Even more than this, there is a strong emotional connection—not always between the OT and the patient—but between the patient and their belongings, their pasts, and their memories. We become the OT, taking it all in, one detail at a time: the pain, the struggle, the defiance, the canny wit, the Glaswegian dialect, the resilience, and the sadness.
Husband guides us into the domestic and clinical spaces of Glasgow. Getting around the city is as much a part of her work as actually being an OT, as ‘The Digestive System’ makes all too clear. In this poem, the Kingston Bridge is a ‘beast petrified/ in concrete’. The huge PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW slogan blurs past, obscured (p.50), and different parts of the city are ‘announced in sans serif’ signage (p. 52). Motion is the key, and it opens the door into the private spaces of the poet’s patients.
At several points in this brief collection, I had to stop reading, close the book and wait. We all know someone who has suffered or is suffering. It is often someone very close to us. Sometimes it is us. And as I was brought into the lives of the OT’s patients, my feeling for them increased. The image of the lightheaded woman on page 8, relying on neighbours for shopping, leaving the gas on for extra heat. Or the man who takes so long to eat his sandwich he can’t enjoy it. ‘His face can’t smile but his eyes do’ (p. 16). These occasional knockout blows were delivered realistically and quietly, with enough power behind them to force me to stop for a moment.
This is not to say that the work is without light. There is plenty of humour. There is even a wonderfully crafted crossword near the centre of the book titled ‘The Immune System’. Words like “Antibody”, “Histamine”, and “Microbe” can be found, alongside “Aye”, “Vigil”, and “Memory”. As always, Husband carefully weaves the importance of relationships into her poems, and in this case the immune system is implicitly shown to depend on other people: “Foe”, “Friend”, “Helper” (pp. 32-33). Zooming out, we can read an organic design in the collection, molecular in its structure. We begin with ‘Prefixes’, end with ‘Suffixes’, each of which features two columns of text, separated by a large space, cleverly playing on the distance between medical terminologies and the people to whom they are assigned. The poet discusses this, and other such methods, in her reflective piece.
Reading the Room
The heartbeat of the collection is the series of 41 prose-poems titled ‘Room’. The shape of each ‘Room’ (single-paragraph blocks) is, according to Husband, ‘intended to visually symbolise the anonymous, isolated rooms across the city that I visited’. Each room features a person, identified only by a letter of the alphabet. Some letters are used twice across the series, others once, and two (‘I’ and ‘U’) not at all. Surely, Husband is doing something with perspective here, putting the emphasis on the lives of the unnamed patients, preserving ‘I’ for the poet and ‘you’ for the reader.
In one room, ‘O’ can no longer reach the light switch and simply doesn’t use it. They say to the OT: ‘Cannae believe I’m like this now’ (p. 26). In another room, ‘S’ complains that getting through the receptionist to a doctor is too difficult. They confess to having fallen asleep on the phone to the ambulance service (p. 34).
The voices speaking in these rooms are equal parts anxious, funny, stubborn, and on the verge of giving up. Throughout the collection, there tend to be two of these prose-poem Rooms at a time—like the pulse of the heart—separated by other poems of different meters and styles, all connected by the OT’s close observations of Glasgow and its people. Sometimes, what separates these Rooms are yet more rooms (‘Clinic room’, Cold room’, ‘Waiting room’) and other spaces like the quintessentially Glaswegian ‘Close’.
There are ‘closes’ and ‘wynds’ in Edinburgh’s Old Town, between the old buildings, but most commonly these words call to mind the inside entrance and stairwell of Glasgow’s famous sandstone tenements. As Niall Murphy says in the Glasgow City Heritage Trust podcast, ‘Glasgow is a tenement city par excellence.’ But it is in this space that Husband confronts the chief problem with Glasgow’s architectural charm: access. The OT considers how to advise the patient:
Have you considered rehousing? I’m obliged to ask, knowing it might mean leaving a home, years of memories, good neighbours, friends and family down the road, trade it all in for the unknown. (p. 28)
Stairlifts in closes do exist (though I’ve never seen one). What I have seen is the determined steps of ageing bodies up and down the stony steps, their shadows moving slowly on the shiny tiled walls. Husband is bringing our attention here to the contradiction in celebrating architectural heritage which many people simply cannot navigate.
At times the OT’s efforts seem futile or at least limited by the bloody-mindedness of their patients. But this never comes across as judgment. If anything, the enduring calm of the OT reveals the power of human contact and the importance of engagement with someone, anyone, professional or not, in the lives of people otherwise isolated through illness, injury, or general poor health. This is the artery which connects all the Rooms.
A Time and a Place
The ‘References’ section at the end of the book serves as a playful collation of public health speak and trends in policy where people and their movement in civic spaces are concerned. A favourite of mine is ‘Ill Health and the Miracle Medicine of New Roads’. Just like the Prefixes and Suffixes, this section serves to highlight how distant the people are from these studies about them.
There is much more to comment on. Others will, I am sure, note Husband’s authentic portrait of north-west Glasgow and its dialects, and her ability to draw sympathy from the reader by giving her subjects the respect of careful assistance and observation. In the Room of p. 12, F is the sole speaker: ‘I’m managing no bad hen, I don’t think I need ony help, there’s worse aff than me.’ This familiar Glaswegian voice recurs at a nice pace.
But there is something which clung to my memory long after I finished reading this work, and it can be found in the first Q’s Room.
Air hunger, they call it, more like a drooth, the bronchial tree with dry roots. But what do metaphors matter? (p. 30)
In asking this question, Husband leaves the poetic imagery, literally, at the door. Because she has to. Because the patient can only nod affirmations to yes and no questions. Here, Husband shows us there is a time and a place for poetry, and while the imagery of it is often born in these Rooms, the destination of poetry is often somewhere else. In breaking the fourth wall here, Husband humbles metaphorical language, and focusses on Q’s basic needs.
‘Eating is a priority, but exhausting,’ says the OT. ‘The bathroom feels miles away. I leave a plastic urinal.’ There is no metaphor required for this exchange with the patient. Previously, in ‘Narrative Medicine’, metaphors and similes are skilfully turned over and unfolded, showing us the everyday language particular to Scotland. It begins: ‘Am I the weather arriving / with a metaphor? / Or a metaphor / arriving with the weather?’ and, following several questions such as ‘how do you take your narratives?’, the poet asks ‘How are you weathering today?’ By the time the reader arrives at Q’s Room, this potential of metaphor as a medicine has been quietly withdrawn.
There is no collection of writing quite like this. Husband has brought her career and her poetry into sharp focus; through her eyes we glimpse the soul of Glasgow, which has always been its people. I commend Husband for avoiding the played-out tropes of Glasgow as a sickly city with a high premature mortality rate. One of Glasgow’s many well-documented crises, the ‘Glasgow effect’, is a term deployed frequently in the media to describe the often-unaccountable poor health of the city’s people. On 10 June 2016, The Guardian ran the headline ‘The Glasgow effect: “We die young here – but you just get on with it.”’ This is the well-known endurance of the Scots in full effect. ‘How are you weathering?’, the poet asks. This glib headline offers, perhaps, the most typical answer.
Here are the ingredients of the city’s well-kent character: canny, defiant, and unflinching. These characteristics are present in Husband’s many portraits, but—thankfully—there isn’t a trace of sensationalism. There is no attempt made to paint Glasgow as the poverty-stricken, gritty, hard-man of cities. Instead, there is humanity and a sense of agency. As Husband chooses to end one of her poems, ‘A woman walks into a city’, so I choose to end this review:
‘A woman walks into a room, within it is a person, and this is their city’. (p. 11)
About the author
Craig Lamont is a writer and academic. For the most part, Craig is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow, with an interest in Scottish literature, Glasgow, fiction, memory, and identity.
References
Husband, Vicki. Glasgoscopy (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2025)
Husband, Vicki. ‘Glasgoscopy: Creative Writing as Reflective Practice’, in The Polyphony. 27 May 2026. https://thepolyphony.org/2026/05/27/glasgoscopy-creative-writing-as-reflective-practice/ [Accessed 8 September 2026)
Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Episode 4: Tenement Life: https://www.glasgowheritage.org.uk/episode-4-tenement-life-with-ana-sanchez-de-la-vega-tenement-house-and-allistair-burt-camphill-gate/ [Accessed 8 September 2026)
Goodwin, Karin. The Glasgow effect: ‘We die young here – but you just get on with it.’ The Guardian. 10 June 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jun/10/glasgow-effect-die-young-high-risk-premature-death [Accessed 8 September 2026).
