Desert Wells (signed copy)

London: Michael Joseph, 1946.

Signed Presentation copy from the author to Raymond Barnett, with his bookplate laid down to the front pastedown page. First Edition. Slim 8vo. pp 55. Red cloth lettered and decorated in silver at the upper board with the slightly browned slightly marked non-price-clipped dust wrapper. Forty-two poems. A pleasing association copy of Dorothy Wellesley's new poetry collection, inscribed to her friend and literary executor, the musician H. Raymond Barnett.
Raymond Barnett played the clavichord with Wellesley in a 1955 BBC broadcast, as she read poems from her new collection, Early Light. It was a performance that evoked the poet's earlier collaboration with W. B. Yeats in their Cuala Press Broadsides and their shared view "that poetry should be spoken to the sound of string instruments". A sometime correspondent of Vaughn Williams, Barnett was also interested in English folk music.