"Nothing is unseen or untouched here," the poet Robert Lowell wrote of Robert Siegel's poetry, and it is equally true of this new collection. Moving up the chain of being from inchworm to angel, they celebrate being in all its aspects, from unset?tling glimpses of the abyss to union with nature and that which transcends it--from oracular beasts to ordinary people, from the seismic love of boar and sow to a surgeon's reflections on a near-death experi?ence and "the last tantrum of a dying star." On the way they explore the mystery of evil, the meaning of history, our own mysterious quests, and the human search for transformative joy. His poems rejoice in the being of each particular thing, finding epiphanies in the ordinary, inviting us to step outside ourselves into an "ecstasy of particulars, ? whether daughters ?kicking the water to flame, ? ?the star in the dawn's throat, ? the red ?tomato's pulsing alarm, ? or the silent ?syllable of the moon.?