Madness, Rack and Honey      By Mary Ruefle                                                         My Rating 5/5 stars  

What would you think if you come to a book because you wish to know more about poetry, about the craft, about how a poet is inspired to write and find that it tells you more about life, about living, about that feeling of being alive.

Where, as you flip through the pages, you start discovering a voice, not of the writer’s but your own, coming to you from hidden recesses of your mind. An awareness which, as it gazes across words, appearing pages after pages, as if being uttered for the very first time by the writer, begins simultaneously to turn inward.

Where the echo of those words bring a cerebration of your own thoughts and make you wonder if you know anything about life at all.

This book by Mary Ruefle, a collection of her lectures on poetry, isn’t just a brilliant book of criticism. It is a beautiful work which invariably prompts you to dig deeper into the craft, into the places and ideas it seems to come from, into secrets and fear and madness, into the beginnings and endings, in a language which is personal as well as bewitching.

Her voice, alternately smart and silly (to borrow from David Kirby in The New York Times) puts forth fresh, intuitive and ingenious views in a subtle, sometimes humorous, manner thereby making it a delightful, delightful read.