Salkeld, Blanaid

(1880-1959)

   Irish poet, dramatist, and actor, born in Chittagong, in what was then India but is now Pakistan, and grew up in Ireland. Salkeld's father, a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, introduced her to poetry at a young age, and when he was in India, she sent poems to him from Ireland; he had two volumes of these printed privately in Calcutta. Around 1908 she became an actor with the Abbey Players and played the lead role in George Fitzmaurice's threeact play The Country Dressmaker (1907). Her verse play Scarecrow Over the Corn was staged in 1941 at the Gate Theatre. She contributed numerous book reviews to The Dublin Magazine, reviewing a wide range of books. She focused especially on contemporary poetry and used her review writing to promote an interest in poetry by women, especially Irish women. Her poetry publications: Hello, Eternity, 1933. The Fox's Covert, 1935. The Engine is Left Running, 1937. A Dubliner, 1942. Experiment in Error, 1955. Some of her poems: "Anchises," "Evasion," "Leave Us Religion," "Men Walked To and Fro," "No Uneasy Refuge," "Now is Farewell," "Optimism," "Youth."

   Sources: A Celebration of Women Writers: Plays Produced by the Abbey Theatre Company (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gregory/theatre/appendix-I.html). An Antholog y of Irish Verse: The Poetry of Ireland from Mythological Times to the Present. Padraic Colum, ed. Liveright, 1948. New Irish Poets. Devin A. Garrity, ed. Devin-Adair, 1948. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Irish Verse: XVIIth Century-XXth Century. Donagh MacDonagh and Leenox Robinson, eds. Oxford University Press, 1958. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).