Simon Armitage

Apart from ‘November’, ‘Kid’ and ‘Homecoming’, the poems in the AQA GCSE Anthology are taken from Simon Armitage’s collection A Book of Matches.

They are short poems that have the sonnet as their template and this is in keeping with the brevity of the pieces of life story that are told in them. Armitage was a probation officer and had encountered an exercise in which members of a group would try and say as much as possible about themselves in the space of time it took a match to burn down, finishing before the fingers were burnt.