Section A — Unseen poem: 'Allotment, Late October' (written for this paper)
My father's hands are maps I never learned —
the creases where the river of his life
went underground, the knuckles like the hills
he left behind, the scar from a bread knife
in nineteen seventy-nine. He kneels in mud
and pulls the last potatoes from the clay
as if they're letters from a home that's gone,
reads each one, brushes it, puts it away.
I offer help. He waves me off. Not yet.
The light goes thin as tea. The bonfire smoke
leans east, the way his talk does after wine,
towards a village, and a lane, and an oak.
I stand there with my phone, my clean white trainers,
my accent from the town where I was born,
and watch him plant the garlic for next year —
one clove, and then another, in the cold, in the dark, in the turned earth, like a vow.
From Component 3: Poetry
130 marks
Read the unseen poem 'Allotment, Late October'. Compare the ways in which the writer presents a parent–child relationship in this poem and in one other poem of your choice from your post-2000 anthology (for example, 'Eat Me', 'Out of the Bag' or 'Material').
Score 0 / 30 · 0 of 1 marked
This paper is written by Plasmo in the style of the Edexcel A-Level English Literature exam. It is not a past paper and is not produced or endorsed by the exam board.
post-2000 and unseen Exam Questions: Edexcel A-Level English Literature | Plasmo