A God’s Breakfast

After four long silent years – his last poetic utterance in volume form having been his millennium What? Again? Selected Poems – Frank Kuppner breaks our poetic fast with a major new compendium, effectively three heaped servings in one. Kuppner is renowned as a superior Glaswegian wit and Man of Feeling. The qualities he displays he also imparts. In The Uninvited Guest we encounter Kuppner the Classicist. A new classical world emerges in a strangely edited riot of epigrams – 782 of them, and annotations. Then, in West Aland, a massively important writer and thinker is put firmly, if great-souledly, in his place; the poem is subtitled ‘Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil’. Finally he heaps on our plate a dazzling collection of individual new poems. Such abundance is humbling: it is difficult to describe in advance what is in posse a God’s breakfast.