Shortlisted, Adelaide Festival Literary Awards.
The sourcebook for the film Hemingway in Spain, this hybrid work melds several Hemingway “voices”, the author, the “Hemingway Hero”, and the author projecting the Hemingway consciousness and aesthetic on a contemporary Spanish landscape.
“The poems stitch you into a tapestry…with loose threads left hanging just to trip you up if you become complacent.” Bev Braune, Australian Book Review.
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 categorized, 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 Reiter’s photographs from Spain, providing a taste of what’s in store in his DVD based on the book. The enhanced eBook, available direct from IP and on the iBook store, contains audio readings of many of the poems.
The DVD is available in PAL and NTSC versions and for download from Amazon. The audiobook is now available from Audible.com as well as other major audiobook sites..
Take a look at the DVD film version as well.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
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
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
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
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
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
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Hemingway in Spain is a substantial and accomplished piece of writing which, often in the persona of Hemingway, retraces poetically many 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
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
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
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
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