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Now All Roads Lead to France
The Last Years of Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis

Faber and Faber

2012

ISBN 978-0-571-24599-4

£20 [hard back]

“The Dead Returning Lightly Dance” *

Occasionally a book lends itself to being read slowly – a book which you don’t want to end, but to go on and on. This marvellous book written with a poet’s heart about the life of Edward Thomas, mostly covering 1913 to 1917, is such a book. It has the cadence of poetry; the poetry of a life lived. A biography that brings someone to life, and starts to go into and beyond the skin of its host. From Monro’s Poetry Bookshop to Dymock to Arras, the many strands of the story are all brought together into this nest, where the reader can rest and be nurtured, and see what it means to grow into the poet.

Quoting Edward Thomas, Hollis writes “the engine of writing should be the rhythm”, and this book too is the rhythm of many people that come together and interweave their signatures. The narrative takes the reader to the places of meeting-minds, and blends in the other poets of the day. The intermingling of lives that stop and stay, that come and go, and how the friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost comes to find its “spirit-level”.

To have a book of Thomas’s poems in one hand and this biography in the other allows you to see how the poems came to be written. You see the secret places of where words are smudged out or scrunched into a paper ball. The way in which the writer of good prose turns into the writer of poems; and how the prosaic notebook entry for Adlestrop becomes the poem of a short sustained wait on a summer’s day; the long heavy tread of the caterpillar turning into the short light dance of the butterfly. And how poetry reflects life, and life reflects poetry such that Thomas was to later describe his wartime experience as “a sort of interval in reality, a protracted railway waiting room”.

The poetry that might have come from Thomas’s experience in warfare was to be still-born. Perhaps if he had had periods of safe return from France, his writings of prose and diary would again have led to poetry. Frost would have liked to have given Edward Thomas the spoken assurance that Thomas was indeed a poet. No poem may have come back from France, but the gravestone of Thomas in the cemetery at Agny Military Cemetery, France has the singular word “Poet” inscribed at its foot.

The gravestone of Edward Thomas
in Agny Military Cemetery, France