AQA Anthology

AQA Character and Voice poetry Anthology: Carousel revision video ...

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The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (the AQA) has produced Anthologies for GCSE English and English Literature studied in English schools.

Video AQA Anthology

2004 Anthology

The original Anthology was a collection of poems and short texts. The anthology was split into several sections covering poems from other cultures, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, and a bank of pre-1914 poems. There was also a section of prose pieces, which could have been studied in schools which had chosen not to study a separate set text.

English: Poems from Other Cultures

GCSE English students studied all of the poems in either cluster and answered a question on them in Section A of Paper 2.

Cluster 1

Edward Kamau Brathwaite: "Limbo"
Tatamkhulu Afrika: "Nothing's Changed"
Grace Nichols: "Island Man"
Imtiaz Dharker: "Blessing"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes"
Nissim Ezekiel: "Night of the Scorpion"
Chinua Achebe: "Vultures"
Denise Levertov: "What Were They Like?"

Cluster 2

Sujata Bhatt: "Search for My Tongue"
Tom Leonard: "Unrelated Incidents"
John Agard: "Half Caste"
Derek Walcott: "Love After Love"
Imtiaz Dharker: "This Room"
Niyi Osundare: "Not My Business"
Moniza Alvi: "Presents from my 'Aunts' in Pakistan"
Grace Nichols: "Hurricane Hits England"

Criticism

In 2005, Andrew Cunningham, an English teacher at Charterhouse School complained in the Telegraph that the inclusion of the poems represented an "obsession with multi-culturalism". After removing "Education for Leisure" from the anthology in 2008 (after a complaint made by Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire), the exam board was accused of censorship.

English Literature: Poetry

Seamus Heaney

"Storm on the Island"
"Perch"
"Blackberry-Picking"
"Death of a Naturalist"
"Digging"
"Mid-Term Break"
"Follower"
"At a Potato Digging"

Gillian Clarke

"Catrin"
"Baby-sitting"
"Mali"
"A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998"
"The Field Mouse"
"October"
"On The Train"
"Cold Knap Lake"

Carol Ann Duffy

"Havisham"
"Elvis's Twin Sister"
"Anne Hathaway"
"Salome"
"We Remember Your Childhood Well"
"Before You Were Mine"
~~"Education for Leisure"~~ - removed from Anthology
"Stealing"

Simon Armitage

from Book of Matches', "Mother, any distance greater than a single span"
from Book of Matches, "My father thought it..."
"Homecoming"
"November"
"Kid"
from Book of Matches, "Those bastards in their mansions"
from Book of Matches, "I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself"
"Hitcher"
"The Manhunt"

Pre-1914 Poetry Bank

Ben Jonson: "On My First Sonne"
William Butler Yeats: "The Song of the Old Mother"
William Wordsworth: "The Affliction of Margaret"
William Blake: "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found"
Charles Tichborne: "Tichborne's Elegy"
Thomas Hardy: "The Man He Killed"
Walt Whitman: "Patrolling Barnegat"
William Shakespeare: Sonnet 130 - "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess"
Robert Browning: "The Laboratory"
Alfred Tennyson: "Ulysses"
Oliver Goldsmith: "The Village Schoolmaster"
Alfred Tennyson: "The Eagle"
John Clare: Sonnet - "I love to see the summer..."
Percy Shelley: Ozymandias

English Literature: Prose

Doris Lessing: "Flight"
Sylvia Plath: "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit"
Michèle Roberts: "Your Shoes"
Joyce Cary: "Growing Up"
Ernest Hemingway: "The End of Something"
Graham Swift: "Chemistry"
Leslie Norris: "Snowdrops"

Maps AQA Anthology

2015 Anthology

The third anthology was produced for first assessment in 2017.

The anthology includes poems under the heading "Moon on the Tides" and prose under the heading "Sunlight on the Grass". Some of the poems are by authors of poems in the first anthology such as Agard and Armitage.

Poems

'The Clown Punk' by Simon Armitage
'Checking Out Me History' by John Agard
'Horse Whisperer' by Andrew Forster
'Medusa' by Carol Ann Duffy
'Singh Song!' by Daljit Nagra
'Brendon Gallacher' by Jackie Kay
'Give' by Simon Armitage
'Les Grands Seigneurs' by Dorothy Molloy
'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley
'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning
'The River God' by Stevie Smith
'The Hunchback in the Park' by Dylan Thomas
'The Ruined Maid' by Thomas Hardy
'Casehistory: Alison (head injury)' by U. A. Fanthorpe
'On a Portrait of a Deaf Man' by John Betjeman
'The Blackbird of Glanmore' by Seamus Heaney
'A Vision' by Simon Armitage
'The Moment' by Margaret Atwood
'Cold Knap Lake' by Gillian Clarke
'Price We Pay for the Sun' by Grace Nichols
'Neighbours' by Gillian Clarke
'Crossing the Loch' by Kathleen Jamie
'Hard Water' by Jean Sprackland
'London' by William Blake
'The Prelude' extract by William Wordsworth
'The Wild Swans at Coole' by W. B. Yeats
'Spellbound' by Emily Brontë
'Below the Green Corrie' by Norman MacCaig
'Storm in the Black Forest' by D. H. Lawrence
'Wind' by Ted Hughes
'Flag' by John Agard
'Out of the Blue' extract by Simon Armitage
'Mametz Wood' by Owen Sheers
'The Yellow Palm' by Robert Minhinnick
'The Right Word' by Imtiaz Dharker
'At the Border' by Choman Hardi
'Belfast Confetti' by Ciaran Carson
'Poppies' by Jane Weir
'Futility' by Wilfred Owen
'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by Alfred Tennyson
'Bayonet Charge' by Ted Hughes
'The Falling Leaves' by Margaret Postgate Cole
'Come On, Come Back' by Stevie Smith
'next to of course god america i' by E. E. Cummings
'Hawk Roosting' by Ted Hughes
'The Manhunt' by Simon Armitage
'Hour' by Carol Ann Duffy
'In Paris With You' by James Fenton
'Quickdraw' by Carol Ann Duffy
'Ghazal' by Mimi Khalvati
'Brothers' by Andrew Forster
'Praise Song for My Mother' by Grace Nichols
'Harmonium' by Simon Armitage
Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell
'The Farmer's Bride' by Charlotte Mew
'Sister Maude' by Christina Rossetti
'Nettles' by Vernon Scannell
'Born Yesterday' by Philip Larkin

Modern Prose

'My Polish Teacher's Tie' by Helen Dunmore
'When the Wasps Drowned' by Clare Wigfall
'Compass and Torch' by Elizabeth Baines
'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning' by Haruki Murakami
'The Darkness Out There' by Penelope Lively
'Anil' by Ridjal Noor
'Something Old, Something New' by Leila Aboulela

AQA GCSE English Literature Paper 2 Section B: Anthology Poetry ...