Meeting the Jet Man by David Knowles
ISBN 978-1-906120-30-6
Trade paperback; £8.99
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David’s first poetry collection, Meeting the Jet Man, was published in October 2008 by Two Ravens Press. It was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council First Book of the Year Award in 2009, and the poem So What Does It Feel Like? was Highly Commended by the judges of the Forward Prize and will appear in the 2010 Forward Book of Poetry (available October 2009).
The book comes direct from the cockpit of a modern fighter-bomber. It brings the sparse poetry of aerial warfare up-to-date, aiming neither to glorify nor to apologise. Knowles’ dogged pursuit of himself in the guise of the Jet Man takes us into the aircraft with him, moving us beyond the CNN video-clips of surgical strikes and collateral damage. Meeting the Jet Man is about a young pilot growing up in thrall to past icons of war and aviation – and following that vision into the heart of the high-tech killing machine that is modern warfare. At a time when the natural distance between our society and its military risks becoming chasm of incomprehension, these poems throw one thin thread across the growing divide.
The Introduction to Meeting the Jet Man:
My dreams about flying started some short time before my dreams about sex. With a similar whole-body sensation in the two cases. Shortly after that came an awareness of the great air battles of the Second World War – through feature films such as The Battle of Britain and The Dambusters. In my young mind some sort of fusion took place between these two threads – the flying and the warfare – which was in a sense quite arbitrary. There are many reasons to take to the air, warfare being only one of the more outlandish. The combination of themes was no less powerful for that – so powerful that it has taken me thirty years to glimpse the contingent nature of the connection. It is like finding that the smell you always associated with your mother’s kitchen, and always took to be a function of her cooking, actually originated at the bakery next door.
I have just completed twenty-five years in the RAF. Those years were dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in flying and the application of my aircraft as a weapons system. Nothing more, nothing less. There can at times be an almost monastic completeness to the life of the fast-jet aircrew, the Jet Man.
Physically, flying is strange. The world is frequently upside down, your body often weighs four or five times its normal weight – or less than nothing. Great distances are consumed in seconds. Into that environment warfare intrudes. Or at least a tiny, upside-down frog’s-eye glimpse of warfare intrudes. These poems are intended to take the reader into the cockpit and communicate that glimpse. For the strangeness of the sensations and the obscurity of some of the terminology I have no antidote but the poems themselves, plus a few explanatory notes at the back of the collection. Overcoming disorientation, both spatial and situational, is at the heart of military flying.
The sections of the collection are chronological – following the military operations in Iraq from the first Gulf War up to 2008, and my own involvement in them. However, the writing is not intended to be a ‘working through’, nor to provide a potted history, much less a resolution of moral issues. It is intended to bear witness to terrible events and what it is to actively participate in them. Why read such a book? Because it is easy for the natural distance between a society and its military to become a chasm of incomprehension. If this is allowed to happen, the decisions a society makes about the employment of military force are liable to be erroneous. I hope that these poems throw one thin thread across the chasm.
But before you go on operational duties, you first need to learn how to fly…
Through the Sound Barrier
No, there are no colours
we can still hear our thoughts
through air crammed so solid
nothing gets away.
Only goose-prickle shock
after shock-waves burst
through the skin of wings,
decorate the canopy with
hot thorns, the lambda feet
of brittle gas.
Still we push fuel through
a fat garden hose into burner cans,
bulldoze through these brambles
dragging at our sleeve
while the great salmon slab-tail
of this transonic Tornado grunts and holds
nose steady, scythe-line clear
through a forest of startled icicles,
leading shocks and trailing shocks clear-felled.
So mustn’t we be quiet now
— out here ahead?
Alone, an old altimeter
round glass, much as it was,
curtseys in an LCD cockpit
to the passing of Mach one.
