Frank Kuppner’s The Third Mandarin contains 501 quatrains in

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).