Bomber County

Bomber County might just be something a bit new. It certainly can’t be called a straightforward history – lacking as it does the deliberations of politicians and (more prosaically) an index; neither could you call it a standard work of literary criticism. No, what Daniel Swift does with this slim but fascinating debut book is to fuse a history of one part of the Second World War with a reclamation and a reevaluation of the the poetry it created. But there is a third layer to this architecture that holds the structure together and that is a personal memoir retracing the final weeks and days of his grandfather a Lancaster pilot who disappeared over Holland in June 1943.

The past few years have produced a glut of books, websites and television programmes focusing on the excavation of personal and family histories. They are, in their own way, part of the line of thinking that began with the postmodernist destruction of the grand narrative in the 50s and 60s. (Yes, Who Do You Think You Are? with Graham Norton is a monument to postmodern metanarratives.) What makes Bomber County so interesting and so novel is that it takes this cultural obsession with our roots and uses it to realise a higher purpose than mere self-indulgent curiosity.   

At the heart of this ‘search’ for his grandfather is the search for the poetry of bombing. The grim and tragic warfare of the trench is fixed in our cultural memory through the poetry of Sassoon, and Owen, but where are the poets of this new kind of warfare? Swift challenges the assumption that the mechanisation of war and the vast and rapid movements of armies were antithetical to the writing of poetry. His intelligent analyses of Dylan Thomas and the American poet Randall Jarrell in particular not only bring back into focus the distinctive poetic moment of the Second World War, but also ask us to reevaluate the controversial role of the bombers who so influenced the war’s outcome.