Gandon Editions
MICHAEL KANE – BLIND DOGS: A Personal History
MICHAEL KANE – BLIND DOGS: A Personal History
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
by Michael Kane
ISBN 978 1910140 406 400 pages (hardback) 24 x 17 cm 32 drawings index
Michael Kane is a painter, and, like many painters present and past, he is also a writer. He has published three modest books of verse and numerous prose pieces, usually dealing with matters of art and literature. Of a generation which has lived during the high point of the flowering of 20th-century modernism, the great practitioners of this movement, as well as the masters of the past, are his exemplars. He has remarked to the effect that “the whole history of art” must somehow be present in even the most contemporary of works.
Blind Dogs is a work of reflection on the states of mind and culture during the author’s lifetime up to now, and a meditation on his personal experiences in Dublin and elsewhere. Despite the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune, and visitations of mysterious and sometimes distressing psychic phenomena, descriptions of which permeate the narrative, it is intended also to be a funny book.
"From this book alone ... it’s clear that Kane is as much a writer as he is a painter. Interesting though his life is, you will read BLIND DOGS for the pleasure of immersion in his writing, in which compassion and dispassion, pathos and comedy are deliciously mingled. Interested in ideas and where he stands, he has an equally avid interest in people and observes them acutely. With his eye for the peculiar and the askew, he can be unfashionably frank — but is just as frank, and unfashionably funny, about his own 'contemptible self'."
— Anne Haverty, The Irish Times
_____
EXTRACTS
"The saddest event in the mid-sixties was the unexpected death of Patrick Kavanagh within some short months of his marriage to Catherine Moloney, the sister of my good neighbour Helen, an outstanding artist and a genius in stained glass. I was given a lift to the burial in Inniskeen on a late autumn afternoon by two men of a slightly older generation who had known the poet, and it was my first exposure to the peculiar rituals of the interment of famous men. Despite the fact that in Dublin literary circles, except for his immediate associates and a growing number of young poets and discreet devotees like myself, Kavanagh was not popular because of his towering disdain for most of his contemporaries. Despite this, there was a huge turnout of poets and journalists. He was, after all, a celebrity. There were agitated scuffles at the graveside when the clergy had completed their duties and TV cameras were poking their intrusive lenses into the crowd. John Montague, having elbowed his way to the front, won the battle to appear on the six o’clock news, and addressed himself to the cameras with a prepared statement. I had never seen him in Kavanagh’s company or in any of his haunts, and was surprised that someone more intimately acquainted with the poet had not done the honours. Anthony Cronin, in Dead as Doornails, laments that Kavanagh “chose to die on [him]” while he was teaching in an American university.
My companions and I, and a multitude of others, returned to McNello’s pub, an establishment still fully equipped with a small grocery department and a snug, whose door was neatly labelled in gilt lettering, “Smoking Room”. In there, I discovered when I poked my head in, were clustered in a dense box of smoke the members of the real inner circle, and I wonder to this day did I miss, in the confusions within the enormous crowd around the grave, a contribution to the obsequies by one of these intimates, or is my memory of Montague’s solo performance a correct one? Before we left, we relieved our bladders at a gate into a field, and as I looked across the featureless ensemble of wet grass and stunted trees, I was drawn into the atmosphere of those early poems of the master that had transformed such a commonplace scene, through youthful innocence of vision, into an Edenic landscape of the mind."
— from vol. II, ch. 7
|
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Volume I The Author in the ’fifties / Mother and Child / Granny Meany / Maurice, man about town / Patrick Kavanagh / Tennis, Herbert Park / River Bather I / River Bather II / Joe Begley / Ronnie Drew, late ’fifties / The Father / The Mother / A Victim / The Schoolmaster / Sprat / Loving Couple / Entrance to Herbert Lane / My Girlfriend’s Mother / James McKenna / The Beloved Volume II Upper Baggot Street / John Molloy / Anthony Cronin / Liam Miller / Dancer Resting / John Kelly / Kiwi / The Swiss Driver / Paul Durcan / Harry Kernoff / Francis Stuart / Brian O’Nolan / Myles na Gopaleen / The Author, 2023 |
published 2023
