Search results for ""author frank kuppner""

"The 501 quatrains of Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984)". But it isn't: 'Please note that this is a completely different work, although it is formally identical and very similar in its preoccupations.' Its tone is different - something to do with maturity and cadencing, which make the laughter and heartbreak more intense, more political.

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Frank Kuppner’s The Third Mandarin contains 501 quatrains in five `books’. It collages an alternative Imperial China of drunk poets, grumpy sages, and sex-starved emperors. The poems riff on a variety of forms, from prophecies and love letters to drinking songs and graffiti. As a storyteller, Kuppner sticks faithfully to the path of least significance. His is a poetry of things that might happen in a minute or two, to people we don’t really care about, for reasons too complicated to go into. His characters have a habit of turning up late to their own poems, as the poet rushes off to find them so that he can get started. Half riddling philosopher, half drivelling idiot, Kuppner’s speaker has the air of someone who has forgotten why they came into the room, 501 times. Funny, ridiculous, and beautiful, The Third Mandarin confirms Kuppner as a poet `of immense intellectual and comic power’ (Poetry Review), `one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry (LRB).

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Comic, cosmic: for Kuppner the terms are inseparable. In the three plaited sections of "The Same Life Twice", Frank Kuppner asks the essential, answerless questions about human existence: What are we doing here? Is it really here? And why here? 'Fortunately,' he writes, 'it is nearly always possible to take notes, even if these habitually contradict each other.' Here are Kuppner's fieldnotes from life in an unfathomable universe. A sardonic Virgil showing us a directionless "Infinity", Kuppner guides us through a reality in which we are just 'one more of the ignorant infinite dots / rather than the vast central vortex we must feel ourselves to be'.

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After four long silent years - his last poetic utterance in volume form having been his millennium What? Again? Selected Poems - Frank Kuppner breaks our poetic fast with a major new compendium, effectively three heaped servings in one. Kuppner is renowned as a superior Glaswegian wit and Man of Feeling. The qualities he displays he also imparts. In The Uninvited Guest we encounter Kuppner the Classicist. A new classical world emerges in a strangely edited riot of epigrams - 782 of them, and annotations. Then, in West Aland, a massively important writer and thinker is put firmly, if great-souledly, in his place; the poem is subtitled 'Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil'. Finally he heaps on our plate a dazzling collection of individual new poems. Such abundance is humbling: it is difficult to describe in advance what is in posse a God's breakfast.

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Frank Kuppner's new book consists of three hilarious, philosophical, existential sequences: The Liberating Vertigo of a Final Passage of Meaning, Not Quite the Greatest Story Never Told, and Not Quite a False Fresh Start.

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