Synopsis
From one of our most celebrated poets - winner of two National Book Awards and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle - an extraordinary memoir that has dictated its own thrust and shape.
Philip Levine's The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. It celebrates the poets who were his teachers - particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, whose lives and work, Levine believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. As the book progressed to include an account not only of his own childhood and young manhood in Detroit but also of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine realized that he was also striving to discover "how I became the particular person and poet I am." The resulting memoir is a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty, elegantly rendered in a prose as characteristically Levine's as his verse, it is superb - and essential - reading for everyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets.
Reviews
This National Book Award-winning poet worked as a young man in Detroit's Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory with "a sense of utter weariness that descended each night from my neck to my shoulder" because he wanted to conserve his intellectual energy for his writing. Levine, according to his mother, "set out to prove there is social mobility in America . . . so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as adult joined the working class." Nine essays of varying lengths, collected from distinguished literary reviews, are loosely linked by autobiographical detail: stories of his poetic mentors, his travels to Spain, his wife and sons, his translations of Antonio Machado and his slow migration into the world of teaching. His portrait of John Berryman, with whom Levine studied at the University of Iowa Creative Writing Workshop, glows with affection: "He was the most brilliant, intense, articulate man I've ever met." More a gloss on the poet than an autobiography, these essays lack an emotional thread to bind them together. Despite the fluent and often elegant prose, their curiously slack, anecdotal tone leaves admirers of Levine's poetry dissatisfied.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Nine autobiographical essays (all published previously in literary magazines) by National Book Award-winning poet Levine, forming a rough but revealing chronicle of influences and inspiring moments--from the author's humbling origins to his contemplations of later life. In the first episode, a gentle tribute to John Berryman- -Levine's mentor in his first year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop- -the life and craft of the poet appear completely entwined. Whether learning at the feet of the prickly but humane Berryman, or subsequently being encouraged as a Stanford Fellow under the tutelage of Yvor Winters, apprentice Levine's circumstances are rendered with wit and considerable feeling. Other experiences, however--including a 1965 sabbatical with wife and children in Franco's Spain that afforded the opportunity to discover and appreciate Spanish poets such as Antonio Machado (with five poems of Machado, translated by Levine, included) and to grasp the full tragedy of the Republican defeat--prove even more moving. In a typically wide-ranging chain of associations, another essay links childhood encounters with class realities in Detroit to much later ruminations on Spanish anarchism experienced while the poet was in Barcelona--with these linked to Levine's apology, through analysis of Yeat's ``Sailing to Byzantium,'' for having failed to live according to the anarchist ideal. Restless, probing fragments of a memoir that mix lyricism and life in equal measure, creating a subtle portrait of the poet both in embryo and fulled formed. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Would that all autobiographical efforts were anywhere near this good. Shunning a literal retelling of his life, award-winning poet Levine has instead assembled a series of autobiographical essays not originally conceived together. The result is an elegant if tough-minded account of his struggles to leave behind the rough-and-ready world of lower-middle-class Detroit and become the first-class poet he is. From the affecting memoirs of two important mentors--John Berryman and Yvor Winters--to an account of his steadfast effort to crack the code of Spanish verse while living with his family in Spain, Levine manages to make clear his commitment to poetry and abiding leftist convictions while keeping readers completely entertained. Does it matter that in two essays he "takes such liberties with actual events that they could be regarded as fictions"? Not really; this is not a straightforward life for future scholars but, like all good poems, an imaginative rethinking of events that gets at a deeper truth. Highly recommended.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Levine has evaded the burdensome chronology of straightforward autobiographies by writing a set of essays that illuminate signal interludes in his life as though he were taking us through a rambling old house at night and shining a flashlight, briefly, on a select photograph, favorite chair, or bookshelf. His prose is every bit as lustrous as his poetry, and his memory, as poet's memories must be, is supple and sure. What he remembers best is not so much himself but his mentors. Modest and somewhat bemused by his life, Levine confesses to having to work very hard at poetry, just as he labored amid the spirit-pounding racket and roar of a Detroit auto parts factory in his fatherless and cash-poor youth. But wherever he found himself, Levine learned from others. As an industrial refugee, he came to revere the courage and integrity of anarchists. As a college student, thrilled at the clean quiet of academia, Levine embraced the wisdom, passion, and unerring aesthetics of his two most influential teachers, John Berryman and Yvor Winters. But the most haunting and enigmatic of Levine's mentor tributes is "The Bread of Time Redeemed." This phrase is the first line of a poem written by a 14-year-old girl whose perception and gift for language flowed with a spontaneity Levine, for all his eloquence, art, and acclaim, can only marvel at, amazed and humbled. Donna Seaman
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