Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology
Edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan
(jonathan cape, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Poetry anthologies are as common as stars in a cloudless night sky in the Catskills. They are of two kinds. The predictable tend to consist of the vigorous shaking up and spilling out of the same old lumpish sackful of favourites. The unpredictable cause us to see an altogether different landscape of the mind and the heart. Geoffrey Grigson edited several compendious examples of the second kind in the 1940s (try Before the Romantics, 1946, for example). Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney gave us The Rattlebag almost 40 years ago. Every poem in that book, the formal and the informal, from the hunter’s prayer to the medieval ­ballad, seems to dance to a slightly different rhythm. What a broad and bedazzling country it invites us to traverse!