Yes. The near-perfect music is nearly always
playing at just the wrong speed
in not quite the right room –
and I can’t say I am over-much impressed either
by the strangely mixed audience it has somehow managed to attract.

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’.