Review: Settle by Theresa Munoz

First published in Gutter 16 (Spring 2017)

Percy Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry that ‘A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.’ The line came back to me while reading Theresa Munoz’s powerful collection, Settle. With immigration still being manipulated by the right wing, and immigrants being reduced to statistics by politicians, Munoz’s direct, subtle poetry gives pause and brings the everyday back to abstract discussions of migration. In the two sequences that make up this book, we find the ‘very image of life’ as experienced by those at the sharp end of an all too blunt debate.

The first sequence, Settle, deals with the poet’s experiences as the child of Filipino immigrants in Canada and as an immigrant herself in Scotland. One always hesitates to assume that the ‘I’ of poetry is the poet speaking directly to the reader, but given how exactly the poems map onto Munoz’s biography – as outlined in the concluding essay ‘Coming to Scotland’ - I feel it’s safe to describe this collection as autobiographical.

Many of the poems are vignettes focusing on one specific experience – racism, visa applications, homesickness – while the rest unpack the spiritual and emotional experience of migration, often by direct comparison with those of her parents’ in North America. In all, it is Munoz’s eye for a telling detail that arrests the reader, such as the dropped payslip in opening poem ‘Twenty-two’ or the uncomfortable security pat-down in ‘Travelling’. Each poem grows from these commonplace images into poignant elucidations of an aspect of migration, the sequence building crystalline into a self-portrait of the artist as an outsider. 

In one standout poem, ‘For Me’, the reader gets to live vicariously the warm, almost Dickensian glow that a throwaway part of speech can give the lonely, the isolated.

Could you type your pin for me.
Just a phrase, but the same phrase
at the shoe place, post office too.
For me... those words hold
a petal-like intimacy,
a light friendship

These poems remind us that when we talk of immigrants, we are never discussing statistics or trends, we are talking about people, families, individuals with hopes, fears and human fragility. A poem like ‘For Me’ allows access to that reality better than any op-ed, think-piece or debate ever could. I can’t help but think what difference it would make if every episode of Question Time began and ended with a snapshot like this. This poems should be taught in our schools.

The second sequence, Digital Life, stands in contrast to the first. While the voices of Settle are often out of their depth and lost, the poet, a digital native according to the blurb, finds herself much more at home online. The style and tone of the poems shift accordingly. The autobiographical thread continues but we are in new poetic terrain. From landscapes and portraits we move to abstract realms, found poetry and more experimentation. Humour runs throughout the collection but whereas in Settle it is more bittersweet, here is it more knowing, cynical, playful, such as in ‘Junk’, built out of a scam email promising loving friendship and great riches in exchange for ‘the number of your safe foreign account.’

But there’s loneliness here too. In ‘Her favourite email’ Theresa (named in the poem) sits on a bus in Scotland rereading an email ‘from a friend across the ocean.’ The depth of friendship and strength of love stretched over thousands of miles rises from prosaic questions such as ‘How are you getting on?’ and helps to ‘smooth over a bad day.’ In Digital Life we are never truly alone, but it’s never quite enough. As it says in ‘Refresh’

Each furious click
in the slow spell of night
means there’s a missing
part of her life, beyond
these tiny words lost
in empty white.