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From mud-larking to swing-bins
Tuesday 28th February 2023
Ten Poems about Rubbish
A load of rubbish? These poems are very far from being that! Published in time for Global Recycling Day on 18th March (and supplied with our new brown eco-envelopes), this selection finds that rubbish is far more than merely stuff we don’t want any more.
There’s a poem in which a swing-bin – complete with peelings and old tea-bags – becomes a vivid still life and a moving elegy when a family home is being cleared after a death. Elsewhere, mud-larking explores how what’s been discarded can still give us pause for thought.
‘Rubbish’ might once have been a throwaway word, but these days it also reminds us how we have cluttered the planet with our leavings.