Through the voices of ordinary people caught up in the struggle, "The Angry Summer" graphically illustrates the plight of the miners and their families during the six-month-long miners' strike of 1926 - 'the summer of soups and speeches'. Idris Davies himself left school at the age of fourteen to become a miner and it was the strike of 1926 that forced him to look elsewhere for work. He is perhaps the most authentic socialist poet of the inter-war years to write in English, because he speaks out of the experience of his own working-class community. This volume presents for the first time a properly annotated edition of the poem, an introduction by Tony Conran explaining the biographical, historical and literary background, and is also illustrated with photographs, newspaper cuttings and eyewitness accounts.

Through the voices of ordinary people caught up in the struggle, "The Angry Summer" graphically illustrates the plight of the miners and their families during the six-month-long miners' strike of 1926 - 'the summer of soups and speeches'. Idris Davies himself left school at the age of fourteen to become a miner and it was the strike of 1926 that forced him to look elsewhere for work. He is perhaps the most authentic socialist poet of the inter-war years to write in English, because he speaks out of the experience of his own working-class community. This volume presents for the first time a properly annotated edition of the poem, an introduction by Tony Conran explaining the biographical, historical and literary background, and is also illustrated with photographs, newspaper cuttings and eyewitness accounts.