This is a book of quotes and epigrams, speculation and anecdote, yearnings and palimpsests, and voices in profusion as David Reiter puts his head down into historical but also fictive intertexts of Tahiti. “I am tired of old planets” one of these voices says, and we too travel through his richly interwoven monologues to search out the nature of art, of civilisation.... These poems even name the siren call of the Internet as the new exotic, the medium of desire. But I was especially struck by the central idea of letters ‘never sent’ as poetic speculation, at its most pointed in the wit and banter between Gauguin and Van Gogh, climaxing in the wonderful Van Gogh commentaries on the famous paintings.

Gauguin in the South Seas, Van Gogh in Arles, surfing the Internet, stumbling into chat rooms or a fish and chip shop in the Cook Islands, explorations of past travellers and the random confused explorations of the Information Highway… Such is the exciting collage of images Reiter places skillfully before us. Phrases, lines, stories that reflect back and forth touching always on the dream of happiness, the longing to make sense of ourselves.

The poems in David Reiter's Letters We Never Sent are also predominantly long. They form a linked series based on the painter Gauguin and the time he spent in Tahiti. They are written in three voices — Gauguin, Ronald Symes who wrote a biography of gauguin, and a contemporary, objective voice — with a change in font to indicate each of the three.

Much of Gauguin's voice comes in the form of letters to his wife, Mette, whom he left behind in France, but it also gives scope for an interpretation of some of his paintings as well as his own life and reactions to events, including his association with Vincent van Gogh. The second voice (Symes) acts as a background in much the same way as do the stage sets of a play. The third voice allows space for comment on current issues and lifestyle, with any parallels or other inferences being left to be drawn by the reader.

The result is a kind of surreal collage, in which the two voices of Gauguin and Symes juxtapose a simple-living, or 'natural', world of that time, where the problems were personal or immediate social ones, against the more complex contemporary world with its internet, its view of Tahiti as a holiday-only place, the unreality of film, conflicting international affairs, advertising and many more perceived ills of modern life. Some of these last, such as the Demidenko affair and 'poor Christopher Skase', are delivered with befitting satirical humour.

There is much insight in this book. It emerges in all three of the perspectives, on the one side in the reinvocation of the persona of Gauguin and the scene of his exiled life and on the other, in the wide-ranging commentary on present-day life. In the end, each voice has its own philosophy. There are Gauguin's words: 'Once the future's promise is on our tongue/ we must pursue until we make it our own!' In the voice of Symes: `I was the future when I came/ but now I am the present...The lagoon is lonely now.' And from the third voice: `The more things change/the faster they change.'