Where the full main title of David Hart’s forthcoming special-edition pamphlet fantasises, the second title suggests the wider scene...

Originally probably an office and observation point for the canal company, on the Bristol Road in Selly Oak, Birmingham, the freestanding building that takes centre stage in this sequence was in recent memory the Knife and Fork café (Titanic café, unsinkable), a small business next door, and above them a huge advertising hoarding. After storm damage, the place became derelict and in 2007 was demolished.

The poem and notes are a mix of local history, surreal and playful language, and not a little anger at the proposed ‘development’ of the canalside area as a huge retail complex on what is poisoned ground sprouting something of a revelation – a wonderful crop of wild flowers.

Published by Nine Arches Press as part of their new mini-pamphlet series, The Titanic Café closes its doors and hits the rocks will also include a selection of colour photographs taken by David Hart on location to accompany the poem. This vivid and dynamic sequence is a fitting swansong to a city’s lost landmarks, the vanishing and shape-shifting human geographies of the heartlands.

Birmingham-based and the city’s Poet Laureate 1997-8, David Hart is known for other Birmingham poems, for hospital and other residencies, for university teaching and workshops, and by way of several books, the latest (Five Seasons Press 2007) being ‘Running Out, which Lyndon Jenkins in Poetry Wales said “is a joy”.