Poetry Pages P eter Davison, in addition to being poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where he has served in various editorial capacities for forty years, has had a long and distinguished career both as a poet and as a book publisher. But all of them, alive or dead, were my companions on a voyage, one of the most exciting poetic 'surges,' to use Philip Booth's word, ever to take place in America.
Vignettes abound, by turns evocative and haunting. . . .
Interviews with Judson D. Hale, Alice Quinn, and Peter Davison by the electronic edition of The Christian Science Monitor Peter Davison's impassioned readings of his own poems that appear here in Atlantic Unbound's Poetry Pages attest to his achievement. And, as suggested by one of the most memorable passages in The Fading Smile, his readings of Robert Frost's poetry, which can also be heard here on our Web site, are informed by an intimate friendship with Frost during the older poet's last years. I was often a visitor to his living room and can even recollect the fragrance of it, a little like dusty patchouli. . . . The public appearances of these years were uneven, and so were the private ones, but the old man, still working at his poems, always thinking aloud, welcomed company in Cambridge and held court for one or two or three friends, or sometimes even a whole class of schoolboys, in his parlor at Brewster Street. Sometimes there were evening parties or appearances here or there . . . .