To understand and appreciate the development and mainstays of a poet over time, one should read both the latest and the earliest of the poet's material. Spires's first volume is Globe (1981), collected from poems she composed as a master's student. Though she was a very young writer at the time, these poems show the maturity and insight of one much more experienced. They make for an interesting comparison to the poems in her later books.

Rooms Are Never Finished (2003), by renowned Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali, is a striking collection of ghazals inspired by the recent death of his mother. Like Spires's book based on her own mother's death, Ali's poems explore loss and family bonds, as well as the journey back to his homeland of Kashmir to lay his mother to rest.

There are thousands of websites about ghazals...