Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden

Glenn Mott

Glenn Mott’s Eclogues recast a classic pastoral form, making it uniquely suited to our times. He considers the inheritance of authority with a mixture of candor and humor in observations on social, natural, and metaphysical transactions. Inspired by China’s Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, these epigrams, poems, and prose meditations achieve a heightened perception, transcending the garden variety truths of both East and West.

• "A quiver of eclogues, couplets, Zen epigrams, and you-name-it literary mischief. The fun is all ours." —Foreword Reviews


• "Mott's whiplash insights are as provocative as coiled springs." —Douglas Crase


• "Mott's lyrical antics embody poetry at its most earnest and parodic, a deadly potion stolen from the fountain of imagination." —Yunte Huang


• "Glenn Mott's epigrams and poems are resting places for a restless mind. This big, generous, thoughtful book is as shockingly fresh as was (and is) William Carlos Williams' Spring and All. As tone—truly many tones—becomes inseparable from thinking, so too do the many registers of humor, elegy, and satire. A wisdom book (with the necessary resistance to over-simplification), Mott, taking up stance after stance, gives us the kaleidoscopic spectrum of what it is to be alive now. This is a book to return to again and again." —Hank Lazer


• "By cross-pollinating two specific forms, the aphorism and the eclogue, Glenn Mott creates a unique voice able to bridge East and West, past and present. These pieces are discrete, but also discursive—conversing among themselves—richly echoing ancestors such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Pound, Pascal, Montaigne, and the American Transcendentalists. Through playful observations, pragmatic advice, and imagistic reflections, Mott prods 'the inscrutability of the already there.' Jubilantly declaring 'consciousness is the aristocracy of life, ' the pleasure he takes in noting and appreciating is obvious—and contagious." —Elaine Equi