Blanaid Salkeld was an Irish poet, essayist, dramatist, translator, actress, and publisher who lived and worked between 1880 and 1959. (2) She was an enterprising and resourceful woman who set up her own press, and her poetry was published in several volumes from the 1930s to the 1950s. She wrote many prose pieces, book reviews, and essays that were published in The Dublin Magazine, Ireland Today, Irish Writing, Poetry Ireland, and The Bell. Salkeld's early work grew out of the Revival whilst her later work was considerably more formally experimental and thoroughly cognisant of the aesthetic and intellectual movements of both European and American modernism. She translated Akhmatova, Bruisov, Blok, and Pushkin from the Russian, and substantially reviewed modernist poetry, Ezra Pound in particular. Salkeld's inclusion in any definition of an Irish canon to date has been nominal rather than substantive, and she is perhaps better known as the mother of Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, the Irish modernist artist, and as grandmother to Beatrice, Brendan Behan's wife, than for her own work. This is in spite of the fact that Salkeld's poetry received glowing contemporaneous reviews, and that she had access to means of production and to a cultural platform unavailable to many of her female contemporaries. A 1934 review of Hello Eternity (3) describes her work as an 'entirely new flower to appear on that roadside of Anglo-Irish literature, and as such, to be cherished--and if it draws the traveller a little aside from the main highway of national tradition it may, for that very reason, bring him a peculiar refreshment of wayside scent and bloom'. (4) Evidently, however, her work has not been cherished by history and it has instead remained a wayside flower lost on the roadside of national tradition. This calls to mind Nu ala Ni Dhomnaill's observation that Irish women poets' contribution to logos is not seen, but is rather considered decorative and auxiliary, as 'wallpaper and begonias'. (5) In the light of Ni Dhomhnaill's commentary on the current reception of women's writing, the terms in which Salkeld's work were originally applauded remain of interest and are of significance for any current reconsideration not only of her poetry, but also of why it continues to be without a place in the mainstream of Irish literary tradition.
