MANCIET (Bernard): ode à noste dame de le... - Lot 231 - Vermot et Associés

MANCIET (Bernard): ode à noste dame de le pou. No date (1950). Folded booklet in a pink jacket illustrated with an original woodcut. Very rare edition of only 45 copies (n°33). Original woodcut illustrations by Rudolf SCHARPF. Some light foxing, very slight brown mark at bottom of last few leaves. It was in the "black" Gascon of his Landes origins that Bernard Manciet (1923-2005) published his first poetic essays in 1945 in the Félibréenne journal Reclams de Biarn e Gascougne. After graduating in Political Science in Paris (1947), he spent several years in Germany as part of the French occupation administration. In a country devastated by war, he abandoned the light-hearted tone of his early texts ("un cert dandysme risolier" [a certain smiling dandyism], as Robert Lafont put it) for the solemn tone, oscillating between lyrical and epic, of the Odes: À Luis Miguel Dominguin (1948), A Noste-Dame de le Pou [À Notre-Dame de la Peur] (1950). The latter poem develops the vision of a Virgin "mother of fear", amputated by torture and machine-gun fire, and opening her arms to "trens de desportats dont lairan après la lua" [trains of deportees barking at the moon]. (Guy Latry)