Archivum

by Theresa Muñoz

Archivum is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meadows, Canongate Kirkyard and Water of Leith provide a meditative backdrop to the poems.

The archives - in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes -- including recipes, telegrams, letters -- stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief.

With a focus on women writers and interracial relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor and psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer.

66 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2025

About the author

Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver, Canada to Filipino parents and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She wrote her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow on the work of Tom Leonard.

She won a British Columbia Arts Council Award and has been a prizewinner in the McClellan and Troubadour poetry competitions. In 2018 she was a recipient of the Muriel Spark Centenary award, writing a sequence of poems based on material in Spark’s archive in the National Library of Scotland. In the same year she was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Consider grief a good thing, how it changes the air's electrons. / How there is the change, from the way / when you emerge from a door, into a door, / when the secret is heavy yet light, becomes actual light / and you can't stop thinking about it.” Theresa Muñoz’s Archivum is an arresting and deeply contemplative poetry collection that lives in archives and their artefacts, trafficking in images of light and dark, past and present, loss and preservation. There is an easy musicality that almost belies the poems’ philosophical depths: “Your eyes veil your thoughts, your inner life stays rich // when silence encloses your words, cleaving a place / for your outer and inner lives to meet. / Your mind races to the brink // in the rippled shadow of the Scott monument, / pretending to be someone else. Your inner life lifts. / This is actually you: the light in left eye's view, / on the other side of the street.” The collection has a number of stand-out poems, not least ‘Register of Corrected Entries’, ‘Dear Frances’, and ‘Ordinary life’. And there are a range of references and subjects, from Muriel Spark to Maggie Smith to Elizabeth Bishop. What does the past — what does absence — tell us about what we have now, and who we are now? “It's gone now, the Cashino. Replaced by bubble tea. / I do a double take when I pass where it used to be, // the sign's yellowness more fruit than flower / and how we walked under creamy light, / one of a kind for the first time ever.” When Muñoz writes, “Only this: picking half-truths / amongst the slanted lines, shuffling papers / into a stack both light and heavy. // Be better, I tell myself. Be worthy of this journey”, it is arguably about her own reading efforts: but so too does it describe our efforts reading her, picking out those half-truths and reaching for betterment and worthiness both.

[Claire Donnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice!