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Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology
‘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.
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.
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 29, 2020
About the author
Alice Oswald
35 books248 followersAlice Oswald (born 1966) is a British poet who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
Oswald read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as a gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, the playwright Peter Oswald (also a trained classicist), and her three children in Devon, in the South-West of England.
Alice Oswald is the sister of actor Will Keen and writer Laura Beatty.
In 1994, she was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997.
Her second collection, Dart (2002), combined verse and prose, which tells the story of the River Dart in Devon from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a "... moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep... a celebration of difference... " . Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
In 2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her collection Woods etc., published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
In 2009 she published both A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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December 23, 2022This astonishing anthology enters as disruptively (and thrillingly) as a thunderstorm. In order to talk about the weather, the book’s editors have compiled 300 entries of considerable variety and scope. Poems, essay excerpts, short notes, weather rhymes, letters, stage directions, and the fevered final journal entries of dying writers combine to describe the weather of all seasons, dawn to dusk. You’ll find the work of Virginia Woolf, Flaubert, Coleridge, Thoreau, Bishop, King Charles II, the Book of Job, John Yau, Bertolt Brecht, Anon, Anon, Anon, Anon, Ruskin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Joan Didion, and Hölderlin, but each entry in this book appears without no formal announcement. All titles are removed, and the author’s names are not at the heads of the poems but instead scrawled in small print along the bottom of the page, so that one narration runs into the next the way a hailstorm might show up in the midst of fair weather.
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:https://orionmagazine.org/2021/08/ele...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:https://orionmagazine.org/2021/08/ele...
September 23, 2021
I won an ARC of this one in a Goodreads giveaway - and I was thrilled! I'm the type of person who goes into a used bookstore and heads straight for the norton anthologies to see if there are any that I don't yet own. I read those suckers for fun. So, when I saw that I had won a Norton Anthology - man, I was thrilled. ...
Only to become immediately disappointed when it showed up.
The editor's decision to not include any kind of information next to the selected excerpts on title, author, etc. was dumb. The "stream of consciousness" style approach the editor was going for...doesn't work, mainly because they're all written by different authors, some are historical, some are modern, so nothing flows like they were hoping for (at least according to the introduction). This also makes it a HUGE PITA for any attempt to use this book as reference material. Because the titles and authors are only located at the back, you have to constantly flip through the book to try to see who wrote what in order to be able to source this - honestly, I've come to expect a certain standard from Norton and this reads more like a plagiarized middle schooler's paper. Eesh.
On top of all of that? This was supposed to be a weather anthology, and it's like the editor just did a google search for things with weather terms in them and then pulled out the excerpts and slapped them together. For example: if it's supposed to be a weather anthology, make it about weather - comparing Ireland to a storm shouldn't count - yet it's in there. All in all, this was a huge disappointment and I'm so glad I won a free copy because it means that I know better than to waste any money on this - and it would truly be a waste.
Only to become immediately disappointed when it showed up.
The editor's decision to not include any kind of information next to the selected excerpts on title, author, etc. was dumb. The "stream of consciousness" style approach the editor was going for...doesn't work, mainly because they're all written by different authors, some are historical, some are modern, so nothing flows like they were hoping for (at least according to the introduction). This also makes it a HUGE PITA for any attempt to use this book as reference material. Because the titles and authors are only located at the back, you have to constantly flip through the book to try to see who wrote what in order to be able to source this - honestly, I've come to expect a certain standard from Norton and this reads more like a plagiarized middle schooler's paper. Eesh.
On top of all of that? This was supposed to be a weather anthology, and it's like the editor just did a google search for things with weather terms in them and then pulled out the excerpts and slapped them together. For example: if it's supposed to be a weather anthology, make it about weather - comparing Ireland to a storm shouldn't count - yet it's in there. All in all, this was a huge disappointment and I'm so glad I won a free copy because it means that I know better than to waste any money on this - and it would truly be a waste.
September 28, 2022
There is some good stuff in here, but there is less continuity than I might have expected, and there is a clear focus on UK / English texts
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews