Richard Jarrette

Richard Jarrette has published several poems in Blind Donkey, the journal of the Honolulu Diamond Sangha, and has written a screenplay, Better Stuff. He is also a working psychothera...

Beso the Donkey
Poems by Richard Jarrette

Richard Jarrette

Winner: 21st Annual Midwest Book Award, Poetry
Winner: 2011 AAUP Jacket & Cover Design Award
Finalist: Foreword Book of the Year Awards, Poetry
Beso the Donkey is a poetry cycle about a wounded, neglected, and abandoned jackass. In sparklingly clear and luminous poems, Richard Jarrette tells the story of Beso and of his caregiver's attempts to understand and heal him — an endeavor that teaches the man much about the meaning of life, death, peace, and acceptance. With undertones of Buddhist, Christian, Taoist, and Islamic faiths, Beso the Donkey incorporates elements of philosophy, ethics, religion, and morality.As the book progresses, we sense the poet’s growing acceptance of life’s passing. Along with the author, we feel a deeper peace blossoming as Beso’s life is ending (which is itself a beginning). This is a lyrical story of loss and acceptance.

Attending Beso

I attand to Beso,
a donkey who will die
but asks so little of me,
a grave enigma.
I inquire with my heart-
he nods with the nobility
of a bearded oak
or Solomon.

Reviews

"The glimpse of Beso (by mail) took me completely by surprise....This is a donkey like no other, and the poems he summoned are our singular good fortune." —W. S. Merwin, U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"This profound, grave, and original book investigates all being, and all attention, through one scarred, silent, four-footed master of the pasture. Simply and without reservation, from first page to last, I am entirely taken and altered by these spare, wise, hauntingly conceived, brilliantly crafted poems." —Jane Hirshfield, author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

"I believe this little book is destined to become a classic. Once you encounter Beso, you will never forget him." —Joseph Stroud, author Of This World: New and Selected Poems

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