[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...