The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (American Poets Continuum)
Eminent American poet-translator Snodgrass, who won the Pulitzer in 1960, offers the "complete cycle" of a work first published in 1977. With over 65 monologs by 15 speakers and a variety of supporting poems in collage format, Snodgrass achieves remarkable historical breadth. The action takes place in one month (April 1945) in the Berlin Bunker where Hitler and other Nazis died, and each doomed speaker has poetic forms appropriate to his or her character, e.g., Heinrich Himmler speaks in a memo-telegram style printed on graph paper and Magda Goebbels in rondeaux. Snodgrass's masterful language is graphic; his analysis of war and defeat and his interest in historical personages pushed to extremes of pain are compelling. Hitler, however, falls well short of Macbeth, and others, alternatively deluded and forlorn, are not so much tragic victims as willing accomplices to those who sacrifice everything in pursuit of power. Still, to hear these voices imaginatively re-created is purgative. Recommended for literature teachers.?Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., InstituteCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.