Poet reveals ‘hideous beauty’ of rubbish tips

A WRITER spent a year as a poet-in-residence at two Yorkshire rubbish dumps braving vast flocks of seagulls – and their droppings – to uncover the “hideous beauty” of landfill sites.

Dr John Wedgwood Clarke spent 12 months at tips near York and Scarborough, notebook in hand, asking people about the items they were throwing away and talking to the people who worked at the sites.

The experience gave him a unique insight into human behaviour, something Dr Clarke explores in his new book of poetry, Landfill.

The poems show how detached we are now from our waste, and how our rubbish shows so much about our lives. Dr Clarke hopes they will make people think more carefully about buying items they don’t need, and throwing away usable items.

Dr Clarke, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Exeter, visited the landfill sites at Seamer Carr and Rufforth.

To access Rufforth, an open landfill site, he had to be driven up in a Land Rover and tractor and could spend only ten minutes there.

He said: “At Rufforth It felt like I’d landed on the moon of waste. I bounced along in the car over marshy fields of nappies and chicken carcasses and plastic water bottles. They’d had to fire off rockets to clear the gulls before we could step outside.”

Dr Clarke described how he was able to chart the seasons of rubbish as the year progressed. During spring he saw people drop off old garden furniture and mowers. In the summer they got rid of barbecues, in autumn pumpkins and glowsticks and in January fairy lights.