Bomber County
The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with the 83rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a night raid on Münster and disappeared.
Widespread aerial bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second.
In researching the life of his grandfather, Daniel Swift became engrossed with the connections between air war and poetry. Ostensibly a narrative of the author's search for his lost grandfather through military and civilian archives and in interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, and England, Bomber County is also an examination of the relationship between the bombing campaigns of World War II and poetry, an investigation into the experience of bombing and being bombed, and a powerful reckoning with the morals and literature of a vanished moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegant memoir, Swift traces the interstices between the bombers of the Royal Air Force, his grandfather's service before his death at the age of 30, and selected passages from Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and other writers working during World War II. Meticulously researched, Bomber County chronicles the London Blitz and bombing raids in Germany without elegizing or romanticizing the era. Notes from logs kept by crews mingle with the author's recollection of his grandfather and oral accounts of survivors and family members, reinforcing Swift's belief that "archives are cathedrals, holy houses where may be answered even the hardest human loss." Among the more unusual discoveries to be found within is the author's acceptance of the mythology associated with his tale; psychological warfare often lead to unreliable perceptions of scale, and the author admits that "even as I write this a small doubt still holds" about his grandfather's fate. With its inherent tension and quiet moments of deliberation, the subject of bombing is well-suited to the literary memoir, and Swift renders a potentially narrow slice of history with warmth and sophistication.
