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.

Richard Jarrette is author of Beso the Donkey (Michigan State University Press, 2010)—Gold Medal winner for Poetry Midwest Independent Publishers Association 2011, A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (Green Writers Press, 2015), The Beatitudes of Ekaterina (Green Writers Press, 2017). He is Poetry Columnist for VOICE Magazine of Santa Barbara and his books have been endorsed by W.S.Merwin, Jane Hirshfield, Joseph Stroud, Sam Hamill, and others. He lives semi-reclusively in the Central Coast area of California and is far into his next poetry collection, It Is Never Finished, inspired by the ancient Chinese poets who named names, praised, and preserved.