The Walls Do Not Fall

London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Stiff card wrappers. Very Good. FIRST UK EDITION. Slim 8vo. Stiff card wrappers, with integral tan dust jacket, printed in black and brown and priced 3s. 6d. Pages printed on cream laid paper, watermarked "ADELPHIA". Toned and foxed, creasing and pushing to edges and extremities, pencil notes to rear panel. POI to inner front wrapper in black ink: "P. B. Hellings/ Jerusalem 1945," with bookseller pencil note on facing half-title: "Welsh poet", stab holes gaping at front hinge (as often seen), some foxing, spine cracked at first gathering, but binding firm. Very good. With an apt wartime association. The printed dedication reads: "To Bryher/ for Karnak 1923/ from London 1942". This copy belonged to the Swansea-born poet, Peter Bernard Hellings (1921-1994). Hellings joined the RAF in 1941 and served in Africa and the Middle East between 1942 and 1946, which corresponds with the PO inscription-location: "Jerusalem". Hellings, who went on to teach literature, was educated at Swansea Grammar School, where he was taught by Jack Thomas, Dylan Thomas' father. His first published poem, 'Poem,' appeared in Bryher's Life and Letters To-day in March 1940, when Hellings was just eighteen. Bryher's literary magazine also featured a number of the poems that H.D. would develop into the sequence The Walls Do Not Fall, and which were later collected, with Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946), as 'Trilogy', in her Collected Poems (1983). Peter Hellings Papers are held by Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales, including correspondence with Robert Herring, the Anglo-Welsh poet, film critic and editor and POOL group member. Boughn A19a.i