Where Poppies Blow continues Lewis-Stempel’s domination of the four-year-old award, which he won in 2015 with Meadowland, before appearing on the 2017 shortlist twice, with Where Poppies Grow and The Running Hare. Lewis-Stempel also looks at how soldiers in the trenches were in direct contact with the natural world, and used nature to take solace when faced with the horrors of war. Where Poppies Blow explores this theory by way of figures such as Edward Thomas, author of the great poem of English rural life Adlestrop, who was killed in action in April 1917 and considers Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, the “musical embodiment of pastoralism and patriotism”. Lewis-Stempel argues that one of the major reasons why men volunteered to fight in 1914 was their desire to “preserve inviolate … rural Britain’s ‘fair sights and sounds and perfumed airs’ – and that “for the generation of 1914-18, love of country meant, as often as not, love of countryside”.
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