The Angry Summer

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.