Spear is a collection of poems in three parts, all orbiting the titular long poem. In the first section, poems sample individual people and landscapes, working to establish a speaker with a coherent public and private mythos. The second section descends into elegy, using a father's loneliness and a lover's loss as vehicles for the speaker to examine his own values. The poems in the third section return to the private and public spheres as if emerging from underground, lyrical and distorted.