SOURCE: "The Riot That Found Its Threnody," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 16, 1994, pp. 3, 9.

In the following review of The Bread of Fire: Toward an Autobiography, Eder discusses some of the prominent aspects of Levine's life.

"I don't understand. I don't understand," Federico Garcia Lorca exclaimed when he arrived in New York. Out of the bewildered encounter between the finely surreal singer of slain gypsies and flowers that bleed, and Manhattan's stink and clangor, came "Poet in New York." A poet can write out of any state of spirit as long as he trusts it. Lorca trusted his dismay.

And he taught Philip Levine to trust his. Levine came to poetry in the course of a dozen years alternately spent studying and working in the hot-metal foundries of Detroit's auto industry. Illegitimate, not knowing who his father was, raised in near-poverty by a keen-spirited mother, he wore...