Same Life Twice

Kuppner Frank

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".

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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