The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography

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. (Jan.)