A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances is a poetry cycle of singular beauty in nature and reveals an inherent Buddhist quality. Jarrette’s poems are clear and meditative, unfailingly beautiful. They are self-aware but not self-obsessed, singing with the ecstatic humility of a mystic or shaman as they join all the subjects of a life well lived within nature that is ever present. The poems dance and sing and play and rest with their subjects to present a truly beautiful vision of the world. The ending poem, “The Pond,” is perfectly representative of all the others before it, and yet its impressive scope doesn’t rob any glory from what precedes it. The poems create their own world where they solve their own problems, build memories, and speak to each other. Richard Jarrette’s book is a manifestation of the inherent conversation between human nature and the wild around us that sustains indivisible mutual integrity and ceases at our peril.
“I am entirely taken and altered by these spare, wise, hauntingly conceived, brilliantly crafted poems.” —Jane Hirshfield’s review of Jarrette’s first book of poems, Beso the Donkey
Reviews
“Richard Jarrette’s wanderlust in the natural world does not require a compass. He treks a starlit path favoring one foot and then the other, attentive and inquisitive.” —Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
“Richard Jarrette’s voice is unique. I don’t know anyone writing in a manner similar to his. There are echoes of Merwin, Rumi, the Chinese, but the texture and tone are all his own. The poems that pre-date Beso the Donkey are building to the miracle of what he accomplished there. But these have their own delights and mysteries, their illuminations and wonder. There is so much richness in his vision and a sense of the sacred along with an accomplished grace that is rare to find these days. It is wonderful to enter these poems.” —Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World: New and Selected Poems
Awards
BESO THE DONKEY (MSU Press, 2010)—Gold Medal Poetry Midwest Independent Publishers Association 2011
A HUNDRED MILLION YEARS OF NECTAR DANCES, 2015 INDIES Finalist, Poetry
About the Author
Richard Jarrette is the author of Beso the Donkey (MSU Press, 2010), Gold Medal, Poetry, 2011, Midwest Independent Publishers Association; Finalist, Book of the Year, ForeWord Reviews; it has been translated into Chinese by Yun Wang. Jarrette lives semi-reclusively in the Central Coast region of California after formative years in Los Angeles and Western North Carolina.
POETRY
$14.95 for print and $9.99 for e-book
Paperback | 120 pages | 5 x 8
ISBN: 978-0-9960872-9-2
Pub Date: April 8, 2015
Bookstores can order via Ingram, Baker & Taylor, or directly from Midpoint Trade Books
Contact the publisher at info@greenwriterspress.com or 802-380-1121
to request a review copy as print or PDF.
Sample poem:
A VIEW FROM THE BENCH
Beneath the canopy of an Italian Stone Pine,
in a ravine below the park, crows
gather to their council.
Hummingbirds kiss and kiss again
the autumn sage
near a bouquet of girls
making rules for their game.
Aristophanes said the Sacred Mysteries of Eleusis
are the saying of many ridiculous things,
and many serious things.
The girls consider whether
imaginary friends should have turns,
deciding—yes—so no one
feels bad.
The crows scatter
to the perimeter of the shade
and the world seems lucky
in every direction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~