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The Same Life Twice

Frank Kuppner

The Same Life Twice
10% off eBook (EPUB)
10% off Paperback
Categories: 21st Century, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2013)
9781847776747
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (258 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847771452
£9.95 £8.96
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  • 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’.
    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
    Praise for Frank Kuppner    '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
    '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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