[Richard Eberhart's] concern has steadily been with the incredibility of the actual. His war poems, lyrical in spite of their fierce concision, speak concretely and eloquently of the incongruousness of the concepts of man and of war. He writes with stunning impact of the mindless butchery, the small cruelties, and the greater horror as

         The Earthquake Opens Abrupt the World,
         Cold Dreadful Mass Destruction.

But in the midst of animal anguish and moral disaster he is alive to the dreamlike vision of anti-aircraft seen from a distance: "a controlled kind of falling stars," and he is not afraid to call attention to "the beautiful disrelation of the spiritual." (pp. 415-16)