Papillote Press presents Looting Hummingbirds: Selected Poems of Daniel Thaly, a bilingual volume edited and translated by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Looting Hummingbirds will be on the shelves in March 2026.
Description: 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 anticolonial 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 trauma that caused a nervous breakdown? Or a failed love affair? He wrote in French, and until now his poems have never been translated into English.
This volume of selected poems (in French and English) provides for the first time a glimpse into his emotions and passion for Dominica while the introduction collates fragments of what little is known of his life — his rise to literary fame and his abrupt descent into obscurity.
Daniel Thaly (1879–1950) was a French Antillean poet known for his lyrical, romantic verse celebrating Caribbean landscapes and identity. Born in Dominica, he studied medicine in France and published award-winning poetry. Thaly later served as a librarian in Martinique and remains a key figure in early Caribbean literature.
Mark Andrews is an emeritus associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Vassar College, New York State, where he taught from 1981 to 2020. His research interests center 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 writing focuses on new practices of representation and contemporary cultural theories.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair in the Hispanic Studies Department at Vassar College, where she teaches literature, environmental studies, and multidisciplinary, comparative courses on the cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America. She is currently working on various book projects including The Amazon Parrots of the Caribbean: An Environmental Biography and Lost Paris of the West Indies: Creative Responses to the 1902 Eruption of Martinique’s Mont Pelé Volcano.
For more information, see https://www.papillotepress.co.uk/
Papillote Press presents Looting Hummingbirds: Selected Poems of Daniel Thaly, a bilingual volume edited and translated by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Looting Hummingbirds will be on the shelves in March 2026. Description: In the first quarter of the 20th century, Daniel Thaly from Dominica, then a British Caribbean colony, was one of France’s most
