Description
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