Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology

This anthology of poems and prose captures the various moods and aspects of a single day, ranging from literary weather to scientific reportage and imaginary responses to transitory events. The entries narrate the weather of the day, from dawn to dusk, and offer a new perspective on nature as a chorus of responses to air's manifold appearances.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 29 October 2020
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

‘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 – Homers winds, Ovids 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 airs manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

Weight: 478g
Dimension: 164 x 214 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787332652