Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology

Keegan and Oswald (Falling Awake) deliver a dazzling anthology of more than 300 numbered works of poetry and prose that enact, contemplate, and celebrate the fluctuations of the weather. As they note in their introduction, "Weather has no plot. It is all mutability and vicissitude, and so is this anthology." This explains the wide array of voices, including Pliny, Wordsworth, and O’Hara, and the range of writings structured "as a notional ‘omniform’ day[…] an impression of weather as nonstop interruption." Titles and authors appear discreetly at the bottom, allowing these poems and excerpts to naturally slip into one another, forming unexpected and gratifying echoes. For example, Entry 57 is an Aristophanes chorus, which begins: "It is from us, the birds, that Man receives all his greatest blessings." This is beautifully juxtaposed with entry 58, pulled from poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s diaries, "July 1872–Nov 8. Walking with Wm Splaine we saw a vast multitude of starlings making an unspeakable jangle." This astonishingly accomplished and varied assembly of poems and literary gems will delight readers yearround, and in any weather. (Nov.)