The Lost Ghosts of Lemnos is a mediation on the tragic and variously religious or metaphysical deep pasts of Greek, Roman, Chinese, Japanese, and Nordic poetries and fragments of poems or plays whose implicit voices are summoned to the present through the re-creations of memory, not through translation but a dialogic, free rendition of them, making new poems from old ones. Among its reimagined voices are those of the Greek tragedians, Horace, a few of the earliest Chinese and Japanese poets, and the lays and sagas of Northern Europe.

But, throughout the book, maybe especially in those not directly rendered from re-imagined ancient writings, all its poems brood on the enduring presence of the poetry of a long ago past in some of today's workings of poetic and historical memory, in the ways memory strives to find itself not lost in the past, but inspired by it while searching for itself, for its own re-discoveries. It assumes that history in its movements is not inevitable, not merely a fatality, but is as well necessary for us to speak through, to inhabit, or to be lost in woods, to be at sea again, helpless wanderers over the earth without it.