Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology is a volume of poems which combines two of Albert Goldbarth's favorite things: science and poetry. He takes a scientific approach in his poetry of all sorts: methodically noticing the details of his life, applying theories, offering evidence, and eventually forming conclusions. This book treats Goldbarth's life experiences as an amalgamation of a single topic, which is the foreign as an informant of the familiar. In poems like "Sentimental" he informs or relates his attitude toward his father's death to the greater function of context. He attempts to minimize the emotional pain of potentially visiting his father's grave by placing the act within the context of material reality -- i.e. cold, hard stones, death in nature, and the human mind's ability to sympathize based upon biological programming.
Throughout his poetry, Goldbarth marries imagination with fact. His writing is a single pursuit of understanding, as he presents his own experiences as indicative of his culture at large and of the scientific knowledge of the Earth to date. In Heaven and Earth this marriage is accomplished through the comparison of the foreign -- to Goldbarth, -- as characterized by Egypt, with the greater context of the universe as a whole. He merges concepts of personal importance relative to universal knowledge in an attempt to rationalize his experiences.
