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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.

"It's an exemplary book, Seidel's best, and one of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years."

Michael Hofmann, Times Literary Supplement, 12/01/2000

"A striking moment of revelation, a booming furious epiphany, cross-hatching Melville, booze, diplomacy, and faith into a compact, strongly consonantal idiom. It's language making itself an insistent part of the subject, calling into question how we tell ourselves about all we know and don't know all the time. It is rare to read anything so plain and dense and strange, and beautiful. A galaxy apart from the detached work of a decade ago, that place of ages ago last night, these poems will stop and startle you. Seidel may not have solved the riddle of the all-too familiar at the brink of the new millennium, but with LIFE ON EARTH, he at least has made new ways to shock us back from the fog."

Gerald Schwartz, Electronic Poetry Review, June/July 2001

Life on Earth: Search Results