Elizabeth Spires's themes, she says, "draw on many sources: childhood, memories, places, and visual images such as paintings and photographs, illuminated manuscripts, and medieval books of hours." The poet she most admires, and with whom she shares themes and forms, is Elizabeth Bishop.

Spires was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on 28 May 1952 to Richard C. and Sue Wagner Spires. Her father worked in grounds maintenance; her mother was a real-estate broker. Elizabeth Spires was educated at Vassar College (B.A., 1974) and Johns Hopkins University (M.A., 1979). She is married to Madison Smartt Bell, a fiction writer. Spires currently teaches creative writing at Goucher College and at Johns Hopkins.

Globe (1981), her first full-length collection, contains twenty-two poems divided into three sections, preceded by a one-poem prelude, "Tequila," which sets the direction the book will take; the speaker leaves on a road "that leads / everywhere." The three sections of the book...