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.