Peter Davison (poet)

For the English actor (born 1951), see Peter Davison.

Peter Davison (June 27, 1928, New York, New York - December 29, 2004, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher.

Davison worked as an editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press and Houghton Mifflin. He was also poetry editor for Atlantic Monthly. He was part of a literary milieu that included Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall.

In 1963, his first collection of poetry, Breaking of the Day, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for publication by Yale University Press; the judge was Dudley Fitts.

Breathing Room (2000) won the Massachusetts Book Award.

Among the authors Davison edited were Ward Just, Farley Mowat, William Least Heat-Moon, and Robert Coles.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Breathing Room (2000)
• Night Music: The Poems of L.E. Sissman, Editor (1999)
• The Poems of Peter Davison, 1957-1995 (1995)
• The Great Ledge (1989)
• Praying Wrong : New and Selected Poems, 1957-1984 (1984)
• Barn Fever and Other Poems (1981)
• Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman (1978)
• A Voice in the Mountain: Poems by Peter Davison (1977)
• Walking the Boundaries Poems 1957-1974 (1974)
• Dark Houses (1971)
• Pretending to Be Asleep: Poems by Peter Davison (1970)
• The City and the Island (1966)
• Breaking of the Day and Other Poems (1964)

Memoirs

• The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-60 (1994)
• Half Remembered: A Personal History (1973)

Essays

• One of the Dangerous Trades: Essays on the Work and Workings of Poetry (Poets on Poetry) (1991)