This article considers Austin Clarke’s Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), in terms of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection. It proposes a revised model of the poem’s structure based on the preoccupation with bodily boundaries and their transgression characteristic of this psychological state. Mnemosyne Lay in Dust is a poem of abjection, one which has an abject figure at its core, and is structured to reflect that abjection, not as a linear progress narrative but as an abject body, with its own imposed boundaries, constructed and sustained not by a sense of self but by a void. Where the progress narrative draws on the repressed power of pollution to achieve its forward propulsion, Clarke’s poem dramatises the abject. He presents us with numerous abject figures and represents the struggles of the abject with the linguistic, social ‘symbolic’. Through the partial, provisional ‘recovery’ of its protagonist from his mental breakdown, the poem shows how abjection is retained as a prop for the symbolic. Through immersion in, rather than repression of, the abject, Clarke’s poem supplies the signs by which the petrified self is restored to life.