Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas - Tapa blanda

'Scrupulous book ... a bravura critical performance.' -- Sunday Times

'Hollis movingly analyses these [poems] and writes heart-stoppingly ... This is a brilliant and superbly written study by a writer, himself a poet, who understands his subject with acute but critical sympathy.' -- Sunday Telegraph, Book of the Week

'One of the many subsidiary delights of this exceptionally fine biography is its melancholy, and often very funny, evocation of the literary life ... Now All Roads Lead To France is a beautiful biography, an unfussy, clear-headed study of the making of a poet, and perhaps above all, a gentle reminder that poetry can be almost as essential to the human spirit as breathing.' --Mail on Sunday, Book of the Week

'Hollis writes gracefully, and with great empathy, about Thomas's sad struggles and yearnings. Absorbing ... serves as a tribute to one of poetry's more suffering souls. It's also an evocation of a lost England that Thomas himself elegised so movingly in the nature poems that, although almost all unpublished in his lifetime, have found an enduring place in the canon of British literature.' --Financial Times

'Hollis's excellent account of Thomas's last years ... Hollis - like Thomas, a poet, an editor and now a biographer - tells all of this very well, his account beautifully structured by place, year and season ... his narrative is calm and discreet, his tone witty and scholarly. His sympathy for Thomas and his admiration for the poetry are clear, but he is unsentimentally candid about his subject's troubles and solipsism ... Hollis's fine book helps us to understand how much more there is to Thomas than willow-herb and meadowsweet and haycocks dry.' --Guardian

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war. The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old. It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.