Frank Kuppner's seventh Carcanet collection, consisting of three books in one, asks the big questions: What is reality a commentary on? Why does non-existence have such a huge opinion of itself? Why don't the eternal silences of space shut up and give us a break?

The Uninvited Guest pieces together the odd lacunae and annotations in a manuscript collection of profound and bawdy classical epigrams. In West land Kuppner considers the legacy of the great twentieth-century poet Mr Testoil, and What Else is There? offers a dazzling collection of poignant and inventive reflections on living on a bluish dot in the universe. Kuppner's explorations of the unreliability of evidence reveal the strangeness of the familiar world.