Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden

In couplets, verse, and prose passages, Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden questions power, polemics, and orthodox thinking. Mott finds inspiration everywhere, from the Adagia of Erasmus, to Virgil’s Bucolics, to the seventeenth-century Chinese Painting Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden. His Eclogues considers the inheritance of authority, envisioning intellect as a kind of malady and thought as a kind of infection. Mott’s paradoxes achieve a heightened perception, transcending the garden-variety truths of both East and West.

The Greek noun ekloge was first applied to inscriptions that kept accounts and described crop harvests, the drafting of soldiers, affairs of state, natural phenomena, forms of market and social exchange. Mott recasts this classic pastoral form for a contemporary setting, making it reflect both the sinister and pleasurable aspects of social life, in both the country and the city. Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden brings together the Western tradition of the eclogue, with classical Chinese poetry, wisdom literature, and the Zen epigram.