Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology

(Paperback)

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Edited by the finest British poet Alice Oswald and the celebrated anthologist Paul Keegan, a groundbreaking gathering of writing about nature's most dramatic spectacle- the weather 'It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather - Homer's winds, Ovid's flood - to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting - weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters - to the drama unfolding above our heads. The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other's elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces- seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air's manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

Reviews

A deliciously playful reminder that the greatest show on the planet is what happens in the skies and all around us. -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *
Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology...in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the senses. -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *
Superb. -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie *
The weather comes at you, page after page, with an almighty and unstoppable roar of terrifying magnificence -- Michael Glover * Tablet *
Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology of disturbances and interruptions, in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the sense. -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *

Author Bio

Alice Oswald's poetry collections include Dart, which won the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize, Woods etc. (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers (Ted Hughes Award), Memorial (Warwick Prize for Writing), Falling Awake, which won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry and Nobody (2019). She is currently the Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Paul Keegan has been Penguin Classics Editor and Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber. His edited collections include The Penguin Book of English Verse and Collected Poems of Ted Hughes.