Excerpt of Savage Coast

CHAPTER THREE At the frontier getting down, at railhead drinking hot tea waiting for pack-mules, at the box with three levers watching the swallows ... The fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun. —W.H. Auden GENERAL STRIKE. The words at the end of a poem, the slogan shouted, the headline for gray industrial scenes, waterfront blue-gray, the black even in the air over mines, the dark sidewalks before factories, covered with lines of gray parading people. Words printed, painted out, broadcast in handbills. Not like [...]