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AQA Anthology: Poems Past and Present Power and Conflict: Section B: Poetry

This document provides an excerpt from the AQA Anthology: Poems Past and Present used for the exam. It lists the poems studied under the theme of "Power and Conflict" and provides one exam question asking students to compare how poets present attitudes to identity in "Kamikaze" and one other poem from the theme section. The question is worth 30 marks. It then provides the full text of the poem "Kamikaze" by Beatrice Garland to use in the response.

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Kevin Xu
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244 views3 pages

AQA Anthology: Poems Past and Present Power and Conflict: Section B: Poetry

This document provides an excerpt from the AQA Anthology: Poems Past and Present used for the exam. It lists the poems studied under the theme of "Power and Conflict" and provides one exam question asking students to compare how poets present attitudes to identity in "Kamikaze" and one other poem from the theme section. The question is worth 30 marks. It then provides the full text of the poem "Kamikaze" by Beatrice Garland to use in the response.

Uploaded by

Kevin Xu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Section B: Poetry

You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section.


Answer one question.

AQA Anthology: Poems Past and Present

Power and Conflict

The poems you have studied are:

Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias


William Blake London
William Wordsworth The Prelude: stealing the boat
Robert Browning My Last Duchess
Alfred Lord Tennyson The Charge of the Light Brigade
Wilfred Owen Exposure
Seamus Heaney Storm on the Island
Ted Hughes Bayonet Charge
Simon Armitage Remains
Jane Weir Poppies
Carol Ann Duffy War Photographer
Imtiaz Dharker Tissue
Carol Rumens The émigree
Beatrice Garland Kamikaze
John Agard Checking Out Me History
5 1. Compare the ways poets present attitudes to identity in ‘Kamikaze’ and in one other
poem from ‘Power and Conflict’
[30 marks]

0 Kamikaze

Her father embarked at sunrise


with a flask of water, a samurai sword
in the cockpit, a shaven head
5 full of powerful incantations
and enough fuel for a one-way
journey into history

but half way there, she thought,


recounting it later to her children,
he must have looked far down
at the little fishing boats
0 strung out like bunting
on a green-blue translucent sea

and beneath them, arcing in swathes


like a huge flag waved first one way
then the other in a figure of eight,
5 the dark shoals of fishes
flashing silver as their bellies
swivelled towards the sun

and remembered how he


and his brothers waiting on the shore
0 built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles
to see whose withstood longest
the turbulent inrush of breakers
bringing their father’s boat safe

- yes, grandfather’s boat – safe


5 to the shore, salt-sodden, awash
with cloud-marked mackerel,
black crabs, feathery prawns,
the loose silver of whitebait and once
a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous.
0

0 And though he came back


my mother never spoke again
in his presence, nor did she meet his eyes
and the neighbours too, they treated him
as though he no longer existed,
5 only we children still chattered and laughed

till gradually we too learned


to be silent, to live as though
he had never returned, that this
was no longer the father we loved.
0 And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered
which had been the better way to die.

BEATRICE GARLAND

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