"SAY, WHO WOULD GIVE BACK THE MEMORY OF LIFE TO THE MAN WHOSE HOPES ARE SMASHED?"

(JONES, Lois Mailou) SENGHOR, Leopold Sedar. Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor. (New York): Limited Editions Club, (1996). Large folio (17 by 22 inches), original purple cloth; housed in original clamshell box. $2000.

Signed limited first edition, number 220 of 300 copies signed by Léopold Sédar Senghor and artist Lois Mailou Jones, with frontispiece portrait and four plates by Jones.

Internationally recognized poet, politician, and cultural theorist, who served as the first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor avoided the Marxist and anti-Western ideology that had become popular in post-colonial Africa, choosing instead to form a close relationship with France and the western world. His poems reflect an “all-embracing humanism which envisions the solidarity of all men, with each nation making its contribution in its own special way to a ‘universal civilization… These are poems written in the calm that follows the struggle for achievement of personal integration; they are poems which, to quote the phrase he uses to define hivernage, reflect ‘the summer and the beginning of autumn.’ Not winter yet, then” (Albert S. Gerard). In addition to a frontispiece portrait, artist Lois Mailou Jones has provided one striking plate for each of the four poems in this volume: "Black Woman," "Prayer to Masks," "New York" and "Prayer for Peace." Jones' "vivid paintings have beautifully converted into silk-screen prints at the New York quarters of the Heinrici Studio, whose craftsmen have executed the prints on paper made at Cartiere Enrico Magnani in Pescia, Italy" (LEC newsletter). Each poem is printed in both the original French and English translations by John Reed and Clive Wake. With LEC newsletter laid in.

Fine condition.