September 2002 sees the introduction of new specifications for GCSE English and English literature, to be examined for the first time in 2004. There will be a new AQA Anthology for use in exams in both subjects.

English - poems from different cultures | English literature - poetry | Pre-1914 poetry bank | English literature - prose

Section 1: English - poems from different cultures

Section 1 of the Anthology is for use in Section A of English Paper 2. Candidates will be expected to have studied both clusters of poems.

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
• Nissim Ezekiel: Night of the Scorpion
• Chinua Achebe: Vultures
• Denise Levertov: What Were They Like?

Cluster 2

• Sujata Bhatt: from Search For My Tongue
• Tom Leonard: from 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

Section 2: English Literature - poetry

Seamus Heaney | Gillian Clarke | Carol Ann Duffy | Simon Armitage

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
• Mah
• 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
• Before You Were Mine
• We Remember Your Childhood Well
• Education for Leisure
• 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

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
• Chidiock Tichborne: Elegy for Himself
• 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
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inversnaid
• John Clare: Sonnet

Section 3: 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