Letters We Never Sent

David Philip Reiter

sty 2000 · Interactive Publications

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As we enter a new millennium, it's no accident that David Reiter's fifth poetic work recalls the grand scope and ambition of TS Eliot's The Waste Land. His is a transparent eye through which we witness ourselves, articulating the unspoken but deeply felt. 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 waas 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. - Philip Salom 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. - Peter Boyle