Frank Kuppner Biography

Scottish poet, born in Glasgow, where he read English and German at the University, and later qualified as an electronics engineer. His principal collections of poetry are A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984) and The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987). Much of his attractively unorthodox verse takes the form of long and highly discursive sequences whose fluent free-verse lines are strictly arranged into four-line stanzas. The range of the exploratory and sometimes enigmatically disjunctive meditations which result is very wide. The recurrence of domestic, erotic, historical, and astronomical themes, together with the occasional introduction of narrative elements, are among the methods by which continuity is sustained. Vividly particular imagery and a keen sense of humour are also characteristic of his writing. His other works include Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! (1989), which contains both poetry and prose, and A Very Quiet Street (1989), an imaginative investigation of a Glasgow murder trial of 1908.