Vacation Verses is the first published collection of poems by Alice Mary Dowd. Many of the pieces demonstrate her love of nature and the beauty that surrounds one in the everyday. Even though Dowd spent more time out of West Virginia than in it, there is an air of Appalachian feeling to many of the selections. Vacation Verses certainly pays homage to Greenbrier County, the area of her birth.
Born in December of 1855 in Greenbrier County West Virginia, Dowd was the daughter of two schoolteachers. The family moved to Massachusetts while Dowd was still a child. She completed several tracts of education including English, German, and classics and was named class poet. Over the years she was employed as a teacher, administrator, and parttime writer, working in schools in Connecticut and New York. She retired in 1926 and went on a tour of the western United States, before returning to Hudson, New York permanently, though she did spend many winters in Fort Myers, Florida. Vacation Verses was followed by Our Common Wild Flowers in 1906 and Along the Way, which is co-authored by her sister Luella, in 1938. Dowd died at the age of 87, in 1943.
