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The Third Mandarin

Frank Kuppner

The Third Mandarin
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Categories: 21st Century, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (120 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2018)
9781784104009
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Aug 2018)
9781784104016
£10.39 £9.35
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • 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).
    Frank Kuppner was born in Glasgow in 1951. He has written eleven Carcanet collections. The first, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Book award in 1984. Second Best Moments in Chinese History received the same award in 1997. A novelist as well as ... read more
       'Goodsir Smith, who drew from poetry from the Far East, shares Kuppner's nimble and fluid ability to code-switch and move from the sublime to the ridiculous in the space of a line or two. The difference is that Kuppner has managed to sustain this for the length of a book of some 120 pages, which is a feat to be marvelled at, and of course enjoyed.'
    Richie McCaffery, The Bottle Imp
    Praise for Frank Kuppner 'Kuppner has the capacity to state the obvious as if it were the most peculiar phenomenon... Kuppner truly is the laureate of the earnestly and charmingly bamboozled.'

    Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

    'He writes with the bemused urgency of someone who has only just noticed that nothing whatsoever makes any sense... Kuppner risks playing with bathos and sarcasm, outright silliness and sheer smut...'
    Sunday Herald
    'Kuppner's poetry invites us to reflect on human knowledge and the ineffable, trivial nature of existence; it is true philosophy. He makes us think about what it means to be alive.'
    The Independent 
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