Articulate and endlessly curious, David Reiter sets no bounds to his taste for the world's many places, people, and happenings. These poems criss-cross Spain as well as the early Hemingway's life and texts, to create a colourful simulacrum of its invincible, fecund life and history.
Judith Rodriguez, Deakin University
Reiter's book bring[s] a panorama of lost worlds to the reader from the Kremlin, to Flinder's Breaksea Island, from Norfolk Island markets... to Idaho. They stitch you into a tapestry blending a rather fine weave, with loose threads left hanging just to trip you up if you become complacent. 'Art does not insist. You must let the fragments/find voice and not worry so much about the gaps.'
Bev Braune, Australian Book Review
What Reiter has done is more imaginative and more genuinely creative and ground-breaking because he has turned Spain not into a land of monuments that the poet reacts to and makes poems from but into a land of voices. Hemingway acts as a kind of guide but the voice is as likely to be that of a character from one of his novels as it is to be that of the writer. And Columbus, Charles the Fifth, Clint Eastwood, Miro, Picasso and a host of others get to speak as well. All of the themes of this 'voco-drama' interrelate because, as one poem says: 'the centuries / act in circles more often than straight lines'.
Martin Duwell, University of Queensland
Hemingway in Spain is a substantial and accomplished piece of writing which, often in the persona of Hemingway, retraces poetically amny of that man's preoccupations, as part of David Reiter's aesthetic response to his experience of Spain (photography is also included). History and its lessons, the blood shed in its making, suffering and stoicism, religion and belief, the mystery of beauty and sex, the nature of modern life and the primal 'truth' (as Hemingway might put it) of ancient cultures and rituals. Pithy observations which in the confidence of their assertion carry a ring of truth evoke the big American style: Infidelity / was a squall for some, an anchor for others / candles against the uncertainties of night...Some believe it's science / others just good luck / that we fall in love / is a superstition; that we stay together is default... ("Contrast at Cuenca").
Nathan Hollier, Overland.152
Australia does have...a few who are masters of the poetic art... they include the great Les Murray, the splendid Phillip Salom and the challenging David P Reiter. Hemingway in Spain is the best example yet of Reiter's experiment with what he calls fusion poetry and the story he tells in the many parts that comprise the whole offers as intriguing and insightful a perspective as any on the great, but flawed American novelist...[he] brings us that man in various forms, whether as the writer, as his greatest character from his greatest novel Robert Jordan from For Whom The Bell Tolls or as an observer looking back. And while taking on Hemingway is a formidable challenge, remember that in the end even Hemingway couldn't live up to being Hemingway. Reiter is more than equal to the task.
Michael Jacobson, Gold Coast Weekend Review
David Reiter's most recent book is a fascinating expression of the problem of history and the emptiness of the social sphere...[the] photos exemplify what I read as the central thesis...the frustrating presence of a past that cannot be pinned down, and that offers no secure place for human subjects...this is a book which disturbs, rather than confirms, a narrative stability. Its uncertain politics, its promiscuous juxtaposing of images, times and places, and its collapsing of the fictional into the historical (and vice versa), leaves something unsettled and unexpected, but something which deserves further attention.
Jen Webb, Idiom 23
ISBN 9781876819828; PB, 124pp
AU$25
US$ 18
CAN$20
£12.95Available in Australia in Europe from Amazon, and in the USA from Small Press Distribution
Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems by David P Reiter, was shortlisted for the prestigious John Bray Award in the 1998 Adelaide Festival Literary Awards.
Reiter's work emerges out of his passion for travel, cultural history, and of course his love of language. Not easily categorised, his writing shows at once a mastery of classical form and techniques but also a playful exploitation of post-modern methods.
There are several Hemingways in this sequence, voices from the past and present, real and imagined, in a mode Reiter calls fusion poetry to produce an unforgettable artistic experience.
Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems is the fourth
poetry collection from an author of international stature.
Now in its 2nd edition, it features even more of Reiters photographs
from Spain, providing a taste of whats in store in his DVD based on
the book.
The DVD is available
in PAL and NTSC versions.

Dr David P Reiter is an award-winning poet, short story author, and Director of Interactive Publications. His previous books include The Cave After Saltwater Tide (Penguin, 1994) for which he won the Queensland Premiers Poetry Award. He recently took up a Leighton Studio Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada) where he produced The Gallery, a multimedia version of his fifth poetic work, Letters We Never Sent.
He has been invited to conferences and festivals through North America and Europe, as well as in Australia, where he speaks about new forms of writing that will extend the audiences for literary work well beyond the bounds of print.
He has a love for music and the visual arts, which often figure in his work. His latest project, entitled The Planets, will extend his range further into literary multimedia and also see an exploration of the intersections between the physical sciences and the arts.
Check out the trailer for the Hemingway in Spain DVD.
![]() |