The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times -- his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness.

Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventeenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.