<div>The second book of an extravagant work-in-progress<br><br><i>What's Joel</i><br><i>Got to do but let the jewel</i><br><i>Hatch</i><br><i>The light and hook</i><br><br><i>It to the flesh</i><br><i>It will outlast</i><br><i>And point the staring woman</i><br><i>At a mirror?</i><br>--from "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal"<br><br>Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i> begins with a journey through Hell and ends in Heaven. Frederick Seidel's trilogy <i>The Cosmos Poems</i> begins in the heavens and descends. <br><br><i>Life on Earth </i>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. <br></div>