Looting Hummingbirds: Selected Poems of Daniel Thaly

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Daniel Thaly from Dominica, then a British Caribbean colony, was one of France’s most celebrated poets. He had studied medicine in France and lived there as a young man until his return to his birthplace. His illustrious reputation - based on his eight volumes of poetry - crumbled when the anti-colonial radicals of the 1930s castigated Thaly for his poems’ insistence on classical form, nature and lyricism. From then on he barely wrote. Was it this t...