System of Ghosts

System of Ghosts by Lindsay Tigue is the 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize winning collection. Tigue was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has received a James Merrill fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and is a current Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. For the 2015 to 2016 academic year, she will serve as assistant to the editors at the Georgia Review.

The Iowa Poetry Prize is an annual event that I always look forward to. It always brings forth young poets and presents them to the world. I am a bit like a child who can't wait until Christmas. I usually review these books too early. I did hold off for three months before reading this a month early.

Tigue seems to write from almost snapshots of memories or images. The detail and experience of her writing conveys the reader to a place and moment in time and presents what seems to be a first-hand account or shared memory. The descriptions are vivid, whether a common experience of traveling on an airplane or more complex interactions with others. She also brings to life images of history and geology with the action of plate tectonics. There is also something of Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias” in "Progress Without End", the motto of Pullman company, whose greatest works are now diners or scrap.

System of Ghosts is vivid, personal, and cordial. It is a near perfect collection of poetry that remains in a traditional form and does not deviate from convention just to be different. The relationships between people (and pets) are warm and the places are familiar. Tigue is able to capture and develop memories ways I could only dream of. Although different from my memories I read and say out loud "Yes, this is what I want to say!". Even her poem “Leap” of her twelve-year-old experience at the aquarium snapping picture after picture of the dolphins being fed and leaping from the water, Tigue captures a bit shared memory. The pictures are blurry and her mother asks why waste so much film on grainy dolphin pictures, yet she cherishes the pictures. I think we all had that imperfect reminder or picture we held on to as a child -- something so common place to adults but very special to us as a child.

Tigue presents an outstanding collection poetry that is worthy of attention and shows the average reader that poetry can be for everyone and that there is a common connection between us all.

I will pick up a paper copy of this book when I run across it. As time goes on and I resample the poems in this book, I like it more and more. Snippets of it even flit through my head- the buffalo slaughter of the wild west, missing a lover (?) by the home repairs you never did get to and a few other images.

This book of modern poetry was quite lovely. I enjoyed learning about the author and her experiences, quite often by how a certain place affected her as opposed to an inner monologue of feelings (which is more common in the books of poetry I've chosen in the past few years.)

Tigue's poetry is an informative as it is imaginative, as emotional as it is researched. She connects life, loss, and love thematically and seamlessly in this highly unique book of poems.

More than accomplished literary poetry, a superb collection

Rake your palm through tree rot. /Rub its umber matter against your shins. /Seek silence that fills with pine trunk creak. /And after you settle in this shifting, lose / largeness. Lose any sense of it at all. from For the Ghost You Might Become

I was reading the novel Lions by Bonnie Nadzam while reading System of Ghosts. Had I consciously tried to couple up books according to subject matter I couldn't have found a better match. One of the things that resonated with me most in both Nadzam's novel and Lindsay Tigue's collection of poetry was the idea of absence being a presence in itself. The space someone leaves behind when they're gone, the subtle presence of a life once lived in a now abandoned house, the places that no longer exist, but hold a space inside of us.

System of Ghosts has three parts, held together by a series of poems called 'Abandoned Places', forming an anchor to the collection.
Tigue's poems seem to try to capture the world in it's multitudes of facets, tracing it back to the origins, both curious for the source as well as afraid to leave anything behind.
Reading Tigue's poems sometimes feels like standing in a tight rain of snippets of history, geology, personal or hear-say anecdotes, bits of seemingly trivial information and deeply personal experiences and as it all washes over you there's a slow forming of a web, an interconnectedness that is felt more than it is understood.
In its core it feels like an attempt to be intimate with all that is, and all that was.

A wonderful collection of poetry.

with thanks to University of Iowa Press and NetGalley for the ARC