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.