Born of notes scrawled during a lunchtime lecture on ‘Orpheus in Ireland, Seamus Heaney and the Poet’s Task, and Other Matters,’ Ghost Estates dives into the shadowy shatter zone where modernity meets myth and magic. Confronted by our collective implication in a complex web of societal injustice–from global conflicts, to the Irish Troubles, to the wholesale theft of aboriginal land that now constitutes ‘Canada’–Sean Howard asks, What is the poet’s task? These poems chart his serpentine quest, following association, incident, murmur and memory backward to the underworld that lurks beneath the façade of our High Estate.