Ciardi records his days and nights as a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during four of the last terrible months of World War II.


John Ciardi (1916-1986): Served as a B-29 gunner in the 73d Bomb Wing, assigned to Saipan. After the war he taught English at Harvard, and served in various capacities as an editor, translator, teacher, and critic. He is perhaps best known for his translation of Dante’s Inferno. He would become the author of several volumes of poetry. The are over thirty aviation poems among his works, and included with this anthology are ‘First Snow on an Airfield’, ‘P-51’, ‘Return’, ‘The Pilot in the Jungle’, and ‘Visibility Zero’. Many of these may be found in his outstanding compilation of WW II aviation poems, ‘Other Skies’ (1947), which contains some of Ciardi’s most lyrically intensive works such as ‘Saipan’, ‘Death of a Bomber’, ‘Elegy’, and ‘Two Songs for a Gunner.’