William Heyen's The Swastika Poems … is one of those rarities, a book of poems which is a book, and not just a collection of picked-up pieces. Indeed, it could be argued that the book comprises a single long poem on an Aryan's contemplation of the Holocaust. Heyen's preceding book, Noise in the Trees …, seemed modeled upon Lowell's Life Studies, with its two slices of related poems sandwiching a middle spread of prose. The Swastika Poems is similarly structured, though the prose is briefer and more objective. With the exception of a single phrase, "His birthday, his fifty-sixth / year to heaven" (which reeks of Dylan Thomas), Heyen hammers out a tough, strong book which is totally his own.

It obviously is a book which he was hurt into writing. Some of the World War II poems appeared originally in his first book, Depth of Field, published nine years ago...