The second book of an extravagant work-in-progress
What's Joel
Got to do but let the jewel
Hatch
The light and hook
It to the flesh
It will outlast
And point the staring woman
At a mirror?
—from "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal"
Dante's
Divine Comedy
begins with a journey through Hell and ends in Heaven. Frederick Seidel's trilogy
The Cosmos Poems
begins in the heavens and descends.
Life on Earth
is the second book in this trilogy. It includes natural and human history, which are the history of the self, and biography, which is the history of everything else, told in vignettes of beauty, sublimity, horror, and regret.