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.

''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