Swift's first book a history of poetry during World War II
Daniel Swift, assistant professor of English
Bomber County-The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War is the title of the first book by Daniel Swift, assistant professor of English at Skidmore. The book was released in August by Farrar Straus Giroux.
Swift will read selections from the book in a reading this week on campus. On Sept. 23, Swift discussed the book in an interview on WAMC-FM and on Sept. 24, The New York Times published a second review.
Bomber County is an investigation into the poetry and bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Bombing 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.
Bomber County begins with the story of the author's grandfather, a bomber pilot with the RAF, who was lost on a bombing raid in June 1943, and in the story of one man traces the larger history of the war, and its echoes in the poetry of the time.
In his Aug. 31 review in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote, "It's a pleasure to walk through this verse with Mr. Swift. His tone is serious but open, scholarly but solicitous of the general reader's ability to unpack sometimes dense poems." Click here to read the review.
Swift will read from his book on Wednesday, Sept. 29. The event, sponsored by the English Department, begins at 8 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.
A native of England, Swift studied at the University of Oxford and then Columbia University, before joining Skidmore's English Department in 2007. He teaches classes on Shakespeare, 16th- and 17 th-century English poetry and drama, and the literature of the Second World War. Bomber County is his first book.
