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- WAKEFIELD, England — POUNDLAND is a low-end variety store chain in Britain, sort of like a dollar store in the United States. It is also the title of a poem Simon Armitage published last year, a contemporary take on “The Odyssey.”
A trip to the store becomes a voyage to a hellish world of cheap consumerism and poverty, where the narrator weaves between aisles of potato chips and made-in-China toys, a customer despairs of loan sharks, and the town drunk — “cider-scented,” “sock-less” and “Oxfam-clad” — offers slurred prophecies about the stock market.