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 and contrary librarians in their tiny libraries, with their perplexing opening hours and their prized stock of just a few books, the landscape itself is changing, and memories and books alike are taken by the breeze and swallowed by the sea.
Dreamlike and darkly-humoured, the library inspector’s journey reveals both a vanishing world and long shadows on the horizon. The narrator might be decidedly unreliable, and the fables fabulous, but at this poem’s heart is melancholy in the face of a reality of library closures and fleeting time, for memory, for love and for the sake of words.