The restless cycle of hope, retreat and renewed energy frames this most intimate of memoirs by punk poet Patti Smith. From a childhood and adolescence pockmarked with endless adversity and ill health, Bread Of Angels maps her journey from crushing poverty and enforced transience to a state of artistic release and a long-sought permanency. Along the way, her rise to prominence as a rock music icon, general of gender equality and true lion of the dispossessed chafes against her own desire for stability, creativity and protective love.

Smith’s formative years are related with a spiritual sweetness and candour, bringing to life a child’s eye view of friendship, the yoke of religion and loss of innocence. Stories of vanquished bullies and purloined pin badges act as balm to her soreness in a stream of tragedy, and her ability to turn disappointment into inspiration helps plant the roots of lifelong resilience. With the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud as her North Star, Smith creates a resoluteness that underpins her prose while her unquenchable optimism acts as a compass pointing towards her need to exist as a writer.

That same gift of lyricism, coupled with her tendency to heap symbolism into every sentence, works both for and against that fluency she craves, and her imagery will delight some and flummox others. The excitement of her New York rise, a dalliance with Robert Mapplethorpe and the patronage of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Dylan bring a gallop in momentum, yet too much reliance on literary richness glazes over the underlying sentiment. The tenderness in her voice when recalling her brother Todd and ‘madrigal’ spirit Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith helps bring balance to those excesses. Only at the book’s end does artifice fall away, revealing where Patti Smith truly resides: a vagabond in a place of peace, safe from the needles of bereavement and wise from the hard but necessary truths of living, learning and creative evolution.

Bread Of Angels is published by Bloomsbury on Tuesday 4 November; main picture: Steven Sebring.