The title of this poem, “City”, also calls to mind Roy Fisher’s 1961 collection of the same name and Fisher as a poet of the city – “Birmingham’s what I think with” as he famously remarked – is an important figure for Wheatley. Indeed his definition of a poem may be Wheatley’s own: “A poem has business to exist, really, if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it.”