Blanaid Salkeld is the most strikingly modernist of the poets in this book. Though born in Chittagong in India, she spent her childhood in Dublin, later returning to India where she met and married her husband. He died in 1909 and Salkeld returned to Dublin, where she became involved in theatre and was a member of the Abbey Theatre's second company. She was also involved in the Irish Theatre in Hardwick Street and, as an Irish-language activist, acted in Irish-language productions. During the 1920s, she became increasingly interested in translation and in the writing of original poetry and published regularly in such journals as The Bell, the Dublin Magazine and Irish Writing. Her first collection, Hello Eternity! (1933), was praised by Samuel Beckett, and later collections developed the modernist dimension of her work in long sequences with fragmented syntax. Though none of her later volumes was as well received as her first they mark an important development of her artistic independence, and are evidence of her unwillingness to compromise her own creative vision. Throughout her career, Salkeld records the struggle to find fitting poetic modes to express her ideas. The challenges her work presents stem, at least in part, from the sense of creative flux and uncertainty that attends the poems. Both …the engine is left running (1937) and Experiment in Error (1955) were published by Gayfield Press, a publishing enterprise she ran with her son Cecil Salkeld; this practice afforded her freedom of form and ambition. She continued writing and publishing until her death in 1959.