A God's Breakfast

Reviewed by Peter Davidson in Scotland on Sunday
Kuppner's new collection is urban, expansive; bursting with parodies, epiphanies and bogus erudition.The middle section is a crazed homage to TS Eliot ('Mr Testoil' is Kuppner's new anagram to replace the lavatorial one which has struck every new generation of English students with the force of revelation), so secure in its echoing of Eliot's cadence that manic assertions which obtrude into the flow of urbane meditation trip the reader with the force of the double-take - "Oh, all right, so I decapitated the cat / It was whimpering in a philosophical nightmare".
The last section is of poems of observation and memory, records of moments in Glasgow.It also encompasses scenes from Kuppner's travels - he would make a fine and infuriating travel-writer - as in his depiction of an old German couple's ancient pet dog: "full, perhaps too full, of so much, such confused love"; or his noticing that the castle on the Starnbergersee has turned "to a tax department of great and austere dignity".
But it is the first section which most beguiles (and teases) the reader.Kuppner made his name with a vast poem which was a bizarre re-writing of classical Chinese poetry.Here he has repeated the trick with even greater panache.This sequence 'The Uninvited Guest', locates itself somewhere amid the epigrammatic poetry of the Roman Empire.The imposture is kept up for page after page in epigraphic fragments which grow stranger, until the interventions of the (imaginary and clearly deranged) editor and translator move the whole enterprise into the realms of the surreal.The fragment "All real angels are impulsive kleptomaniacs" attracts an editorial disclaimer which ends: "Even the tropical fish seemed slightly the happier for it".
The reward for the reader who soldiers on to epigram 783 is to discover there is no epigram 783.But they have traversed a finely realised, invented world on the way to that characteristic anti-climax.
Reviewed by Stuart Kelly in The Herald (Glasgow)
Numerous false starts bedevilled the writing of this review.I tried the hyperbolic ("If you read one book of poetry this year, make it this one"), the bemused ("Why is Frank Kuppner not acknowledged as one of the most interesting poets writing in Britain today?") and even the anecdotal ("While I was reading this wonderful book, I interrupted my wife so frequently, saying 'You've got to listen to this one', that she threw a copy of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own at me).Almost any opening gambit seems banal in comparison to the complex charms of this volume.
Kuppner's style is a glorious melange of contradictions.Theological speculations metamorphose into rambunctious bawdy, wistful resignation turns into wry fantasia.He thrives on qualifications, exceptions and subjunctives, as in this couplet: "Everything changes into something else. / Except the entire universe.Perhaps." He is an arch-sceptic, who doubts even the validity of scepticism; a poet perpetually startled by the seemingly simple fact that the world is the way it is, and the impossibility of its being in any way different.If that sounds rather nebulous, it is worth mentioning that he is very, very funny.
William Wootten, A God's Breakfast, The Guardian Review, Saturday 26th February 2005
There's nothing like kicking a great writer when he's down. TS Eliot, villain of stage, screen and literary criticism, is now a popular football for his fellow poets. Tom Paulin let his prose attacks spill into The Invasion Handbook, and even Geoffrey Hill, the most Eliotic of contemporary poets, has been using verse and prose to bad-mouth Four Quartets. However, when it comes to Eliot-bashing, Frank Kuppner makes the competition look like pussycats.
Though he may not have Paulin's fame or Hill's reputation, Kuppner has been one of the most interesting Scottish writers of the past 20 years. The spoof Chinese-in-translation of his first book of verse, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, like the later Second Best Moments in Chinese History, was novel, funny and often rather beautiful. In a very different manner, the prose of A Quiet Street and Something Very Like Murder spliced investigation into old crimes with autobiographical reminiscence to create what approached a new genre. Other books have varied in style from the fanciful and the manically comic to the meditative and argumentative; the titles of Kuppner's volumes Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! and Everything is Strange indicate much of what is captivating and, sometimes, wearying about his varied oeuvre.
A God's Breakfast is three books in one. The first and longest is "The Uninvited Guest", a sequence of hundreds of cod-classical epigrams and fragments; the third, "What Else is There?" a collection of 120 shorter poems. The rest of the volume is given up to "West lland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil". At 48 pages, "West lland" is about as long as The Waste Land and Four Quartets combined and is, I'd reckon, the most protracted dance ever made by one poet upon the grave of another.
In it Eliot's verse is mercilessly caricatured, his faith and thought denounced, and his private life lampooned. While charges that Eliot was a right-wing Christian, had a bad first marriage and was an editor at Faber and Faber are scarcely news, the contention that Eliot wasn't much of a poet comes as more of a surprise. To help persuade us, Kuppner scrawls ruderies on Eliot's lines ("I grow stout ... I grow stout / I shall walk through St Paul's with my balls hanging out", and so on) and tries to convince us that Eliot wrote doggerel and rhetorical waffle by supplying his own.
Kuppner can be an excellent humourist and pasticheur, but, though it prompts the odd schoolboy titter and hits one or two of its numerous targets, on the whole "West lland" is a repetitive, over-egged and ridiculously over-long affair which diminishes one's respect for Kuppner while doing nothing to lower one's opinion of Eliot.
If there is a justification for "West lland", it is that it pulls down the trousers of a writer who gave intellectual and artistic respectability to ideas which Kuppner's atheism and critical rationalism find erroneous or repugnant, thereby alerting us to how Eliot concealed wrong-headedness with "verbal mesmerism, a hoping that the music / will be taken for elusive meaning". Eliot's ideas no longer have the currency they once did and Kuppner doesn't show Paulin's outrage at Eliot's anti-semitism. Instead it's this mesmerism - or, to put it another way, poetic talent - that seems to be the chief impetus for Kuppner's jeers. The title poem of Kuppner's 1987 volume The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women asks:

"What grey divorces have lapped against the walls of his room?
What seas have slowly rotted into intelligence?
Where were her various sighs already by my reading?

What does that remind you of? "What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow"? Here it's Eliot's "Marina"; elsewhere in The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women and Everything is Strange, it's Four Quartets that influence a verse that can be as labouriously orotund as Kuppner's invented Eliot. "West lland" is the sound of someone shouting abuse to stop themselves falling back under the mesmerist's trance.
"The Uninvited Guest" is much better. Its fictitious fragments from anonymous ancient authors contain the erudite and the philosophical as well as the unremarkable and the obscene, as its protagonists think deeply on the meaning of life, the pursuit of sex, of death and fame, and of how little they care for one another.
There is something to offend almost everyone, including a fair amount that is sexist or homophobic, but there's also plenty to illuminate, amuse and instruct. Kuppner likes the role of Diogenes the Cynic: shameless and funny, pointing out his own animal nature and the foolishness and hypocrisy of others. However, it's Karl Popper, the philosopher of science and vehement critic of Plato, who is the guiding genius of this attempt to enter the disputes of the ancient world in order to address the misconceptions of the present.
Kuppner's desire to hammer home old arguments can knock his own art out of shape, and his work tends to be best when it has the least design upon us. In "The Uninvited Guest", however, Kuppner's ideas are at their most interesting and attractive. All of the gripes of "West lland" - against spurious profundity and obscurantism, against religion, anti-materialism and asceticism - are here. Nevertheless, set free of the grudge against Eliot and placed amid competing voices, they, and the reader, are given space to breathe.
In "West lland" Kuppner observes that "lyricism can be a knack, much like anything else"; but it's not a knack that he has ever quite acquired. Though he can write a neat enough pentameter, Kuppner hasn't the gift for verbal music and emotional and intellectual intensity of, say, Eliot. Kuppner's abilities are, however, ideally suited to diffuse extended poems and sequences; the best description and defence of works like "The Uninvited Guest" coming in the couplet: "Some good stuff; more indifferent stuff; much rubbish / How else is any book going to catch reality?" The short poems in "What Else is There?", which tend to have much the same consistency as Kuppner's sprawling ones, are thus at something of a disadvantage.
When Kuppner tackles the everyday he has his moments - he does, for instance, continue to write well about his parents. However, there's something slightly disappointing about finding someone who has masqueraded as a Chinese poet of the Sung dynasty, an insect and God, recalling his European holiday or contemplating the view from the office of a writer in residence. So it is the, often anti-religious, parables and flights of fancy that most appeal. In "An Ode Suitable for Almost Any Literary Occasion", Kuppner exhorts the fleas that bit Shakespeare as he went

"on writing yet another of his appalling poofy sonnets.
Yes! Bite! Go on! Give him no peace! He deserves none.
Quite apart from the truly atrocious handwriting.
And dead at fifty-two - that wasn't too great, was it?
I mean even Ben effing Jonson managed to beat that out of sight.
And dead on your birthday to boot! Huh. Happy birthday
Bill.

As mean-spirited and bilious as anything in "West lland", but without its tedious self-righteousness, the poem proves that petty envy has its place as a spur for literary endeavour. And that the spectacle of watching lesser poets make fleabites on their betters, while never exactly edifying, can at least be very entertaining.
No Pentecostal fire, but wind
Aingeal Clare, Poetry Review, Issue 35, winter 2004-5
"I am proud to be able to state that there are no misprints / in this work." So ends the first of Frank Kuppner's three-part fantasia, A God's Breakfast. While probably peppered with "misprints" (there is at least one smug "perthaps"), the opening sequence of this stunning collection is a crazily diligent, ridiculous piece of classical scholarship. For over a hundred pages the reader is alone in a graveyard of lost distichs, eccentrically edited by a cranky classicist (our speaker), which in sum would fill the covers of a sourcebook of Western atheistic thought. Far from Samuel Beckett's billigerent "Let us pray to God...The bastard! He doesn't exist!", most of these are charmingly genteel in their atheism: "I sometimes think that forgetting to exist / Is one of the Good Lord's most endearing oversights". Salubrious spoonfuls of Catullan bitchiness keep the project pacy and convincing (and a little camp): "Forgive me, Hippoturdus, if I called you an ageing bumboy. / I mistook you for someone else of the same name". As each fragment grows ever more absurd, and the reasons for its preservation ever more obscure, the editor begins to interject with bibliographical cross-references and his own droll interpretations. There is a striking similarity between the commentaries of Kuppner's speaker and the anorakish cataloguing that went into that definitive "de Selby Codex" in Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman. Even more strikingly, Kuppner's efforts are just as entertaining as O'Brien's, if slightly saner.
The middle section is a hysterically clever homage to that high priest of modernism, Mr Testoil. Side-stepping the lavatorial anagram of that poet's name, Kuppner's "Testoil" is closer to Paul Valery's cerebral Monsieur Teste: high-minded to the point of disembodiment, and embarrassingly pretentious. The piece is divided into five chapters of unbridled blather, which manages to be both a ruthless, searing satire, while also, sonically at the very least, an absolute dead ringer:
Oh the nude Don in the new dawn
Who some thought was a mere dreamer
Lets out another eloquent yawn
As he combats the crude blasphemer
On the greensward of the prawn-coloured Old St Vaughan's
Startling the soon-to-have-vanished swans
The pendulem of eloquence swings between this and the cruder belly-laughs of "I grow stout...I grow stout.../ I shall walk through St Paul's with my balls hanging out". The whole is narrated at some late hour of the night as the poet suffers from a serious but stable flatulence, prompting countless opportunities for lower-brow hilarity, whether in the sporadic upsettings of his philosophical stride ("prrrrrp / so terribly unreal / what?"), or the inevitable parodic whoopee cushion:
although I seem to be
although I seem
although I seem to be farting uncontrollably
Kuppner is a first-class parodist, a master of the art, and his original poetry is full of the same sceptical wit. The contemplative sangfroid of the 120 poems that make up the final section has more in common with classical Chinese poetry (bogus translations of which feature twice in Kupp...