Overview
"Inside a mother, each of us begins a dream," writes Rodger Kamenetz, Actually, two: a mother's dream for her child, and the dream that will become a person. For Kamenetz, crossing the terra infirma - the place where the two collide - was not easy: his mother was a difficult woman who had loved her family with a tyrannical passion. Only as she was losing her battle with cancer at age fifty-four could her son begin to take the essential first step toward becoming a man, thereby fulfilling both of their dreams.Editorials
Tikkun Magazine
Honest and moving, this beautifully written memoir shows us how a first-rate poet honors his mother, while at the same time is liberated to travel along his own separate path.From The Critics
...[A] family narrative in which the major theme is one of silence, of people revealing themselves by what they've kept back....[leaves] us to wonder whether there's more or less to these investigations than meets the eye.Richard Bernstein
...[H]ypnotic, cryptically lyrical....not a narrative in the standard sense....It [circles] its main subject in a poetic meandering....Throughout, Mr. Kamentz is tough-minded and tender...sensitive with a quirky, original intelligence and a dry-urbane, self-deprecatory wit.— The New York Times
Stephen Clorfeine
In Terra Informa...the burning through of a son's maternal ties allows the author to decode their relationship, as well as to release and regenerate both their spirits....Kamentz's memoir brings us to an intimacy at once personal and open-ended, specifically detailed and yet ultimately poetic.— Parabola
Kirkus Reviews
Poet and author Kamenetz (The Jew in the Lotus, 1994) turns his gaze more powerfully inward than ever before in this slender, emotionally searing recollection of his mother's life and death. His mother died of cancer at 54, ravaged by a typically long and painful battle with the disease. Her son was with her when she died, along with her husband and one of her two twin daughters, and Kamenetz recounts the exact moment of her death in carefully observed detail and strikingly modulated tones.
The rest of his essay maintains the mode of careful observation. The book is most powerful whenever the author draws upon the resonance of objects to convey the pain of emotionsnbut the tone veers, quite intentionally, between the detached coolness of the early pages, occasional dashes of humor, and a more openly agonizing self-assessment. Kamenetz's relationship with his mother was rocky, as she yo-yoed between a smothering affection and a fierce anger. As a result, mother and son seemed to spend much time circling each other warily, like two planets held in a painful orbit by mutually powerful gravitational fields. Using essayist Montaigne as a model, Kamenetz tells his own story in a discursive, digressive style, ranging from mordant and funny ruminations on marriage and the nuclear family to harrowing descriptions of illness. He writes like the poet he is, wonderfully drunk on language and constantly serving up fresh metaphors for familiar emotions and experiences. His love for his mother's difficult, savage, sometimes lapsing into a paradoxically deep distaste emerges clearly. At times a frightening read, but an honest and thoughtful one. (Author tour)