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Blurb from the front inside of the jacket:

Much of this book was written on the Western Front, where the author saw action as commandant of an ambulance platoon with General Patton’s 4th Armored Division and received the Silver Star for gallantry in action. First Lieutenant Ray Smith took part in the battles of Normandy, northern France, the Belgian Bulge, and Germany. It was during the campaign in the Saar region that he received the Silver Star.

Lt. Smith was born in Minneapolis in 1915. He attended Hamline University, where he won the Bridgman Poetry Award for three successive years and edited the literary quarterly. His work has appeared frequently in Poetry, The New Masses, and the “little” magazines.

His earlier work has received high praise from Babette Deutsch, William Ellery Leonard, and other outstanding critics and writers. For Comments on NO ECLIPSE, see the back cover.



The back cover reads:

The Critics say of NO ECLIPSE

James Gray, St. Paul Dispatch: “These poems, so intensely intellectual yet so simple in the subdued ardor of their expression, represent the effort of a mature, unintimidated, undazzled mind to interpret the experience of war. That it is a major effort I do not doubt, perhaps the most searching of effort made by a soldier poet of our time. Nor do I doubt that Ray Smith’s firm, almost stern, yet richly melodious voice is one of the finest of our time.”

Meridel Le Sueur: “Ray Smith, in a short span, has been part of the life of the middle border country. As poet and as man, he has never remained outside any arena, a hollow man, but has moved in our time, our land, our native event. Now in war he is also part. On the forge of our time he has helped to forge our time, and these poems speak, - ‘I was the man, I suffered, I was there.’”

Paul Engle: “The war poems in this book are the kind that stand on their own feet as imaginative and controlled writing….They are among the few poems I have seen in which the war experience is wholly absorbed in the substance of the verse. Here is the concrete and yet subtle texture, no the sprawling abstraction, the pat emotion. I hope this book is bought and read.”

Robert Penn Warren: “…the moving record of a sensitive and honest mind exposed to the impact of war.”

Joseph Warren Beach: “A significant and often moving commentary on the ‘human condition’ by a spirit stamped by this age and this war.”

Thomas P. Beyer: “I find myself quite unable to assay these lovely poems, because between them and me comes the memory of the intense, questing spirit of a boy ten years ago, and the thought of the paths through which the decade has led him. Lieutenant Smith will go on up the ‘breathless aisle,’ and poems will mark the way.”




The inside back of the book jacket reads:
Prometheus Press

A NEW MIDWESTERN PRESS CREATED FOR NEW WRITERS, FOR THE FIRE OF LIVING WORDS

Faith in the text and felicitous attention to every detail of design, production, and manufacture shall characterize Prometheus books. Not yet a series - NO ECLIPSE is only the second title - Prometheus Press books are intended for those many who want and value affirmative writing of promise - in original formats - at moderate prices.

Prometheus Press, 919 Edmund Ave., St. Paul 4, Minn.