Terra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced

By Jean Mallinson

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0973656026
• ISBN13: 9780973656022
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Windshift Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.3" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Mono no aware - the slender sadness

This small wisdom book should be by the bedside of anyone who has suffered the misfortune of gentamicin induced ototoxicity. I would like to see it in the hands of any doctor who must interpret for each new hapless patient exactly what the cold hearted caloric ear tests mean for the rest of that person's life. If this became standard protocol much anguish could be alleviated. Anna Jean Mallinson's book reminds me of walking around my plum tree at dusk. It has that same quiet and gentle beauty. Anything feels possible, any hardship surmountable, with this small paperback slipped into my back pocket. But this writing goes beyond the audience of those with gentamicin induced damage. It conjures a breadth of knowledge about suffering and ways to keep moving through the labyrinth of life even when you can no longer close your eyes without falling violently over. Poetry, poery and more poetry seems intergral to the answer. Mallinson has the poet's take on suffering.Her poem, simply titled 'Damaged' acts as the book's epigraph. Such is the power of the chapters following, that love comes. Take this as an example as Mallinson describes her sorrow for her blitzed hair cells 'those diaphanous, waving delicate creatures.' I left this book reluctantly; as if farewelling a dear friend I hoped to meet again very soon. In piecing together this poetical memoir Mallinson may well have been following the edict of Wallace Stevens, quoted by her in an early chapter:- "Tell me, poet, how do you bear The wild, the sad, the terrible ways? I praise.

A Small Gem

Terra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced by Anna Jean Mallinson is a terrifying and beautiful book. The reader follows the author's growing realization that something dreadful has befallen her. With mounting dismay and outrage we discover that no one in the medical world seemed able to help her, even to explain to her what was occurring as her world became increasingly unfamiliar and frightening to her. Ultimately she is thrown back on her own resources and these include her lifelong love of poetry. Her perspective on her own situation through her immersion in great literature, which, as Samuel Johnson says "helps us to enjoy life, or endure it," is a vindication of a life spent among writers. The courage the author displays and her resolve in coping with what life has dealt her shine through her wonderful prose. She takes the reader with her through her frightening new world of lost balance where, at first, each step she takes is a triumph of determination. As readers, we cheer at literally her every step. Beyond the physical progress she makes in adapting to her condition, however, is the reader's sense of her indomitable spirit. This book is a tribute to courage and to the joy and meaning to be found in life, no matter how difficult. Anna Jean Mallinson's book is gripping, poignant, and impossible to put down. I closed it with a great sense of gratitude to her for having shared her extraordinary experience and forTerra Infirma: A Life Unbalanced her affirmation of life.

This is my story, too

I am living the life Anna Mallinson is living. It is good to hear somebody else voice my life. Most people don't understand what we're going through because we look so normal- as long as we don't move! Thank you, Anna, for letting others know about us Wobblers

Terra Infirma : A Life Unbalanced

Reading Anna Jean Mallinson's book left me deeply moved. The author's account of getting used to life after the destruction of her balance takes the reader into a very strange world. Most of us never have seen with different eyes how our environment can seem to change after a toxic reaction to the widely used antibiotic Gentamicin. Anna Jean Mallinson's personal experience mirrors in a highly artistic way her adjustment to living in this unknown "terra infirma" through great poetry. She leads the reader into her strange new life, telling about a mind in a body that overnight refuses to function normally. Her world looks suddenly completely unstable. Without a balance system everything seems to have turned upside down but nevertheless she brings you into the familiar field of human courage. Her record of how a life is transformed by a particular disability is also an account of finding meaning in whatever life brings, however unsettling it may be. The brief book, in my eyes, is a small masterpiece, brilliant, authentic and able to touch your heart. Readers who like the books of Oliver Sacks will enjoy TERRA INFIRMA too.