[Though unfinished, The Führer Bunker is] complete enough to guarantee that the finished product will be a singular accomplishment. Snodgrass's project is audacious enough to keep most poets from giving it a second thought, but it has given him an occasion to which his passionate curiosity about human nature, his architectonic powers, his prosodic finesse, and his evident capacity for research allow him to rise….

Nothing could quite have prepared us for these poems, but looking back we can see how Snodgrass's earlier experiments with the antagonistic persona and the sequence were preparing him. Moreover, the new book is "confessional" in two senses. First, as Snodgrass notes in his "Afterword," his characters "are much more open and direct about their destructive feelings and intentions than their historical counterparts ever were…. The Nazis—like some others one may have encountered—often did or said things to disguise from the world, sometimes from themselves, their real actions and intentions…. My poems, then, must include voices they would hide from others, even from themselves." This comment also gives us a glimpse of the second sense in which these poems are confessional…. [As] Snodgrass had it in "A Visitation," the poem about Adolf Eichmann in After Experience, "There's something beats the same in opposed hearts." Not to understand that, not to acknowledge our human kinship with the likes of the Nazis, is to incubate the potential for evil: that is the conviction behind the book…. (p. 87)

There is much to choke us with disgust from the very beginning of this volume, where Hitler ruminates in characteristically revolting images on the various enemies who now "rise up like vomit, flies / Out of bad meat, sewers backing up."… Snodgrass never lets us avert our eyes. In effect Albert Speer tells us why when he recalls a recent meeting with a doctor, "Our most acute diagnostic mind," who has cancer but does not recognize the symptoms. The obvious comparison is with Hitler, who refuses to see that he is beaten, but he is not the only one who "neglects his knowing." (pp. 87-8)

Snodgrass's prosodic forms are part and parcel of his characters and themes. Except when singing some sweetly melancholy folk song, Goebbels, master of duplicity, speaks in caustic tetrameter couplets riddled with puns. The couplets accent a tone that, as Snodgrass admits, has "a playfulness and malevolent glee" not characteristic of the actual man, but that tone is an inextricable element in a personality that is richly satanic…. Magda Goebbels's three monologues are a set of four villanelles, a set of four triolets, and a rondeau redoublé. The ceaseless repetition of refrain and rhyme—through all 175 lines of her verse Snodgrass uses only three rhymes—comports with a mind whose obsessiveness is a response to intolerable feelings. She too knows more than she thinks she knows, and her forms are nearly hysterical little rituals that keep her fear and self-disgust at bay.

Other poems derive from Snodgrass's previous work with multiple voices. Eva Braun's first monologue dovetails musings on her happiness at being inseparably united with Hitler with quotes from "Tea for Two," her favorite song. Almost incredibly, Snodgrass makes her a touching figure, sensitive within chilling limits. He devises a complicated mise en page for Hitler's monologues, where he juggles several trains of thought, made easier to sort out by indentations that align related fragments and yet interlocked by recurrent images. In Hitler's poems Snodgrass means to sketch a plausible psychobiography—and this aspect of the volume might well be its weakest. We gather that Hitler's attempt to devour Europe, which takes a sublimated form in compulsive eating of chocolate cake and also manifests itself in scatophilia, can be traced to a fear of death, itself inspired by the death of his doting mother. Rather than be swallowed up as she was by the earth, he had meant to "Swallow all this ground / Till we two are one flesh." Snodgrass works this notion out more interestingly than can appear in a brief summary, but we still might wonder whether the pieces—for the layout suggests a pied puzzle—do not fit too neatly, whether this part of the sequence does not smack of clever psychologizing.

Speer's four monologues make up a tour de force. His twelve-line normative stanza, as befits the Reich's chief architect, is shaped: through its penultimate line it makes a right triangle—and then the last line shortens. This odd form is surely a visual pun: the stanza spreads out like diseased cells looking for Lebensraum and then suddenly collapses like the Reich itself…. [Perhaps] enough has been said to suggest the care and inspiration at work. Metaphysics cannot hold chaos in a goblet, his Van Gogh said in After Experience, but in this book Snodgrass's poetics comes very near being able to do so. (pp. 88-90)