Over the last forty years Frank Kuppner has established himself as one of Scotland’s most arresting and inventive poets, capable of finding the profundity in absurdity and the poetry in the everyday. His latest collection Not a Moment Too Soon is a tour-de-force consisting of three extended sequences, and we’re delighted to share a selection of it here at BooksfromScotland.

Not a Moment Too Soon
By Frank Kuppner
Published by Carcanet Press

1. NOT QUITE A FALSE FRESH START 

Clocks were put forward an hour last night. So, on this clear bright morning,
I have the sloping, tree-lined city lane for once all to myself.
More slowly than ever, I walk down it an hour before I walk down it.  

2. A CURIOUS INCIDENT ON A LATE SUMMER EVENING

I look out. Someone is strolling along the street towards the park.
Over there, someone else is gently walking a dog away from the park.
I had more or less decided to get up from this chair at the window.
Why should anyone want to wait, just to see two people walk past each other?  

3. ANOTHER OF THESE PICTURESQUE LOCAL VIGNETTES

Okay. High time to get out there again –
for the day’s messages, some fresh rolls, and (no doubt) another newspaper – 

whatever was happening on this barely perceptible slope,
say, ninety-nine thousand years ago – although now  

a charmingly girlish pair of (presumably) Chinese students
have stopped behind a strange obstruction of chairs left out in the street  

to let this quaint old local, lost (it seems) in his own thoughts,
move more easily past them both, with almost no signal of thanks. 

4. NO INSINUATION OF TENTACLES 

Once again, I look up and glance out of the window just beside me.
Once again, there’s only yet another wrong somebody else
walking unconcernedly down the street in this certainly more meaningful
   direction.
What’s going on? Are only unknown people now allowed to come round
   that nearest corner?
Another sigh. I return to a startling book about the minds of octopuses. 

5. A PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATION

What? Her key in the lock! (I hadn’t even realised
she was out.) No. No – wait a minute. Of course
I knew she had gone out. Of course I did.
Dear God – can’t any of these so-called great philosophers
ever get anything right? (Hello? No – I’m in here!)  

Children are once again pouring out of that school over there.
Dear me … Who can even think of all the schools there must be
on the planet. On all the planets. In this city. Raining still.
Will a few billion more years really be quite enough?
But – enough for what? Yes, that’s the big question, isn’t it?  

Across the road, a man unhurriedly opens the school gates.
First, the left-hand section. Good. Then, what we see as the right.
Morning again. Still pleasantly cool. And, yet again, the planet
has breath-takingly avoided splitting into two overnight.
Or even three. Or more. But two would surely have done it. 

8. STILL WAITING 

One more undistinguished planet somewhere among the millions of
    billions of stars.
It may not be as serious as we think it is.
No. All those different lengths of years passing on every last one of them!
But – it’s very nearly noon. Yes. Surely the Hospital
would have phoned us by now if it really was something urgent? 

9. VISITING TIME NOTES 

The vast impressive frontage
of what I used to think  

was chiefly a Children’s Hospital
has at last been demolished  

(surprisingly quickly at that)  

and, somehow strangely unlooked-for,
the old public clock-face  

the hands of which had stood
static, stationary, motionless, fixed, rigid, unmoving
at five minutes to noon – (or, possibly, midnight) –  

(Yes – look! It really isn’t moving!)  

that too must have gone
not quite patiently off
into some vague, shadowy, unpursuable
nowhere or other along with it – fit backdrop
for many a priceless local Eurydice. 

(Don’t worry about it. It should be all right.)  

But – such a highly doubtful adornment
for any public building
never mind a hospital!  

(Unless perhaps its unique antique status had itself kept it safe till then?)  

And it felt as if a rare resource
of continuing-continuous use and value
had been cruelly removed from us
before we had had even the most last-gasp chance
to seek out a second opinion – 

once proverbially dead-right twice
on every single one of those days –  

all those vital busy days
those difficult labouring days
all those routine annihilating days  

(and what thanks do you ever get for it?)  

Strange, to miss so livelily
(“What did you bring those lilies for?”)
what had by then long since become
so hardened, shameless and encrusted
a chronic habitual deceiver –  

just because something vaguely internal
perhaps went wrong with a ratchet or lever?  

(All these arrivals! Yes. Then, all these leavers!)  

(“Did you really have to talk so much about beavers?”) 

More than half a century –
and no-one (was it really no-one?)
had ever quite been able
(was it really half a century?)
to find enough time to fix it.  

(“I just can’t find the time!”)  

(“But – then again – who ever can?”)  

And, for that matter, did I ever give it  

even a single passing-momentscaring
thought  

on any one of the thousand or two occasions
when (fraught? relaxed? utterly ecstatic?)
I must have paced past within sight of it?  

Well … perhaps I did.
I simply don’t remember.
Always something else
going on unseen
behind the passing faces.  

Like, say, this precarious visit
of what, if it were real,
one might even call hope  

(and think how much hope, genuine hope,
must have arrived here … and then left)  

that right there, near the very end,
not long before it went forever
some fatal dislocation did  

not jolt it back into life again: 

nor some perfectly timed knock
during the fraught process
of ephemeral dismemberment 

– (a mutilating strike
               mutating into
mock resuscitating progress) – 

momentarily shocked it back
into a final spasm of action  

(“That corpse’s arm moved, did it not?”)  

somehow stretching its hands beyond
mere real life and death –
now a parodic portent
of posthumous existence –  

a face once more indicating
that all was still going on – still –
all of it – still –
(whatever this is) – going on – 

perhaps even showing
a suddenly correct continuation  

the minute that it actually was  

exactly the right time of day
for whatever patched-up chaos
was continuing far below – 

where at present a substantially new artery is being created out of the
     local road network. 

Not a Moment Too Soon by Frank Kuppner is published by Carcanet Press, priced £12.99.