Hollis is the author of the poetry collection Ground Water as well as the editor of an elegant new selection of Thomas's poems, which includes extracts from his published prose and unpublished diaries. These were the rough materials from which Thomas crafted his lines, and here, as in the biography, Hollis gives a portrait of the artist as a man at work: shaping, revising, making poems. The biography, Now All Roads Lead to France, is not a story of the whole life from cradle to grave, but of an important period - the last four years of his life, during which he developed a close friendship with Robert Frost, decided to enlist in the army and fight in the First World War, and turned himself into a poet.