Covintree is a graduate student and expository writing instructor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College. In this essay, Covintree explores Spires's poem in terms of formal elements of structure as well as how structure creates poetic tension.

Following in the footsteps of the ancient Turks and Persians, Spires includes a poem titled "Ghazal" in her fifth book of poems, Now the Green Blade Rises. In Spires's case, this poem is a direct elegy for her mother, who died in 1998, and to whom the collection is dedicated. The first section of this book is filled with poems of loss and grief, and Spires uses this specific poem to move the reader through the initial days after her mother's death. In a 1995 interview for the Southwest Review, Spires told A.V. Christie that she believes "everything is connected and that we go on in some...