Looting Hummingbirds

“Thaly’s islands vividly inscribe themselves in his treasured ‘blue panorama of poetry’ where the complexities of a Caribbean life inflected according to class, colour and race, and marked by rooting, uprooting and tentative re-rootings are simultaneously revealed and concealed.” — Maria Cristina Fumagalli

 

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Daniel Thaly (1879-1950) of Dominica, then a British Caribbean colony, was one of France’s most celebrated poets. He was educated in Martinique and then at medical school in France before returning to Dominica. His illustrious reputation crumbled when the emerging anti-colonial Negritude movement criticised his work. From then on he wrote little poetry. Here for the first time in English (and French) we can read a selection of his passionate and nostalgic verse – much about Dominica’s landscape – alongside an introduction that pieces together what little is known of his life.

Mark Andrews, co-translator and writer of the introduction, is an emeritus associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Vassar College, New York State (1981 to 2020). His research interests centre on 20th- and 21st-century poetry and fiction. He has written on the poetry of Saint-John Perse, Gérard Étienne, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, as well as on the fiction of Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, and Gisèle Pineau, among others. His writings focus on new practices of representation and contemporary cultural theories.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, co-translator, is a Puerto Rican academic who specialises in research of the Caribbean. She holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph distinguished professor chair at Vassar College. She has published widely on the cultural and environmental history of the region. The biographer of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, the writer and politician from Dominica, she is the editor of “Love for an Island”, Allfrey’s collected poems, and also “It Falls into Place”, Allfrey’s short stories. Both titles were published by Papillote Press.