The Third Mandarin

by Frank Kuppner

Frank Kuppner's The Third Mandarin is made of 501 quatrains divided into five "books." It collages an alternative Imperial China of drunk poets, grumpy sages, and sex-starved emperors. The poems riff on a variety of forms, from prophecies and love letters to drinking songs and graffiti. As a storyteller, Kuppner sticks faithfully to the path of least significance. His is a poetry of things that might happen in a minute or two, to people we don't really care about, for reasons too complicated to go into. His characters have a habit of turning up late to their own poems, as the poet rushes off to find them so that he can get started. Half riddling philosopher, half drivelling idiot, Kuppner's speaker has the air of someone who has forgotten why they came into the room, 501 times. Funny, ridiculous, and beautiful, The Third Mandarin confirms Kuppner as a poet "of immense intellectual and comic power' (Poetry Review), "one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry" (LRB).

143 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2019

About the author

Frank Kuppner was born in Glasgow in 1951 and has lived there ever since. He has been Writer in Residence at various institutions, currently at Strathclyde. 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).

Reviews

[Muldvarper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sly Kuppnerian haiku-inventions. Not as polished as the preceding 'Second Best Moments in Chinese History' imo. But Frank Kuppner makes me laugh like no one else. Something special on every page.


424.
This venerable old instrument, shaped curiously like a scrotum,
Has such a weak sound and inadequate range
That its use would surely have died out long ago
Had very many court ladies not taken it so their hearts.

(is this my final edit?)