David Reiter’s fourth book, Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems, opens with the selected work followed by poems that may prove difficult for those who find the sparing endnotes insufficient to enlighten them on Reiter’s subtleties, but often exciting for Hemingway aficionados.

I was eager to read this volume, remembering my 1981 trip to Key West while doing a brief stint at Miami University. I went looking for Hemingway’s hang-out, Sloppy Joe’s, hoping for a great find like John Tranter’s Egypt ‘sunning itself’. What stayed with me was another little bar populated by some of Hemingway’s men ‘try[ing] to kill the sun’, or waiting ‘to decipher’ some ‘undisturbed grave’ (‘Ghosts of the Castle at Calahorra’).