Strange Isolation: Lindsay Tigue’s System of Ghosts
review & final poem by Anna Priddy
I suppose it might be hard to read anything right now through any other lens than that of our present circumstances: quarantine, pandemic, protests, and national upheaval. But Lindsay Tigue’s System of Ghosts struck me as particularly fitting of today’s mood. Beginning with the book’s epigraph, a quotation from Sam Bass Warner’s and Andrew H. Whittemore’s American Urban Form: A Representative History that states: “All American cities began at the end of something: a trail, a landing along a river or lake, a railroad,” Tigue’s book is concerned with geography, America, spaces, emptiness, and endings. These subjects kept reminding me of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, another poet intimately concerned with geography.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is comprised of lyric poems of travel and loss, such as the poem “Solitary, Imaginary,” where Tigue writes of what was once “our new house.” Though now the speaker says, “These days, I live alone / and sit near a computer.” “Adapted” speaks of someone leaving and not fixing what needs to be fixed in the house. And Tigue’s “Abandoned Places” sent me to the internet to learn more about Holland Island. To save you a bit of time, Holland Island was an island in Chesapeake Bay that, as it receded into the water, had one house standing there, looking like some sort of apparition of solitude or loneliness, depending upon what one imagines when one sees such strange isolation.
Section II, which truly seems to be the heart of the collection, begins with the titular poem, “We are a System of Ghosts.” This is a poem in four parts that moves between subjects like places lost or disappearing, maps, lost words and images, and trips, though many of them might only be imagined. The poet talks of “wanting to witness that which disappears.” The beauty of these lost places is also the subject of “Convergent Boundaries,” the last three stanzas of which are quoted here:
In fifth grade, when I first learned
about the rift of Pangaea, I cried.
It was too beautiful, the way everything can
and will separate.
But what about love that is there, my god
it is there, but can’t seem to force
the shifting of what’s already in place,
the fault-line fissure, continents halving
into sea. The division of everything—
records and cups and quilts. You can’t see
how the dust might settle. I keep
wanting my own sinking, your reckless weight
above me. Your hand on my back. The ring
of myself that remains.
In the second of her four poems entitled “Abandoned Places,” the speaker declares: “So maybe I am a town / for ghosts. And I know that / places can fall in love // with those who stay awhile, / those who sweep the cracking / stairs, repair the panes // on all the windows.” The conclusion of Tigue’s poem “Leap” seems to me a fit epigraph for the book as a whole, as children on bikes are overheard making plans: “We can go there, they say. But it’s a long way.” Eventually those far away, depopulated places are given over to animals or the fantastic before once again becoming inhabitable.
Section III begins with travel, both real and imagined. The poem “E-HOW” suggests the disappearing down the great rabbit hole of the computer’s interface, a journey that can lead anywhere but in fact gets us, maybe, nowhere. Still, the poet continues to ask those questions and take those trips, as if believing that there is a way, yet unfound, to bridge the distance between us.
In this time, thinking of those questions, disappearing into my own search about Holland Island, and enjoying Tigue’s poems and sensibility, I was inspired to write something of my own:
Islands
For N.B. 07/17/2020
Not one of us is an island, wrote John Donne,
But we are all a part of the main.
Lately we live as if an island
Alone were the best way to live,
As if it were easy to break away.
Both on this land mass, the distance
between us suggests two separate places.
Different climes, different views, like the seams
In the land could, or already did, fail.
Sometimes I wonder how two so far apart
Can be said to be together. Where I am
We are sliding underwater. One day
We’ll all need higher ground.
You talk of islands, and I see Holland Island,
One solitary house standing for hundreds
Of years, all around it falling away.
And I think that for two in love an island
Isn’t an island anymore but is transformed,
For two in love an island is enough.
Anna Priddy is an Instructor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the author of two books, How to Write about Emily Dickinson and How to Write about William Faulkner. Her poems have been published in journals such as Connecticut Review, descant, and Five Points.