Library Inspector: Or: The One Book Library

David Hart's Library Inspector is a requiem to libraries and to the power of books, with imaginative origins in the new Library of Birmingham, and its realisation here in the windswept landscape of coastal Mid Wales. As the figure of the Library Inspector struggles to keep up with disappearing librarians, tiny libraries with perplexing opening hours and a prized stock of just a few books, the landscape is altering and memories and books alike are carried off on the breeze and swallowed by the sea. Dreamlike and darkly-humoured, the Library Inspector's journey reveals a vanishing world with long shadows on the horizon. The narrator might be decidedly unreliable, and the fables fabulous, but at this poem's heart is a solemn melancholy in the face of a reality of library closures and fleeting time, for memory, for love and for the sake of words.