Everything Is Strange

Kuppner Frank

Everything is always strange in the poetry of Frank Kuppner. His first Carcanet book was a single poem, "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty" (1984, Scottish Arts Council Book Award), running to 511 Oriental Quatrains, a kind of Procrustean Bed of Ware accommodating a multitude of four-line feelings, experiments, jests and characters. Then came The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987), with five substantial poems including the "Five Quartets" and much else besides. In the 1989 collection Ridiculous, Absurd, Disgusting!, with its oblique glance at Rimbaud, he managed to include three poems, one in prose, one in verse, and one half-way between.

Everything is Strange consists of a collection of shorter poems and "In a Persian Garden", being a radically altered version of that Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam which Richard La Gallienne paraphrased "from several literal translations" before the Great War; here now... revised, edited, rewritten and re-ordered".

About the Author

Frank Kuppner was born in Glasgow in 1951. He has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Glasgow. In 1995 he won the McVitie's Scottish Writer of the Year prize for for his book Something Very Like Murder. He received a Creative Scotland Award in 2003. Carcanet have published six books of his poetry: "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty" (Scottish Arts Council Book Award, 1984), "The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women" (1987), "Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting!" (1989), "Everything is Strange" (1994), "Second Best Moments in Chinese History" (1997) and "What? Again? Selected Poems" (2000).

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