A Woman's Caribbean Discovery

  Little Cog-Burt  Little Cog-burt was written by a female author from Dominica.  “Phyllis Shand Allrey”, who is most often perceived as a politician who subordinated her promising career as a novelist to her trailblazing efforts to open Dominica’s path to political democracy, rarely—if ever— does her audience think of her as a poet. Yet her favoring of her poetry as “the best part of me” prompts echoes about poetry’s role in her trajectory as a writer and politician that yet invites us to read her commonly read poems in search of her reproductions on that “best part” of her tragically daring image.     Allfrey’s poetic legacy offers both a rich disposition of consideration of Allfrey’s political principles and Fabian Socialist ideals as well as a window into the poet’s personal life, revealing, poem after poem, that “best part” of herself she claimed. Poetry was her earliest literary pursuit, and given the difficulties she encountered in her later years, when sh