Knowing Peter Davison “was like having your own poet laureate,” says Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy, in a moving tribute to his late colleague that appeared in The Boston Globe. He notes that Davison was a direct link to Boston’s great flowering age, when he was an associate of other Bostonians such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur and Donald Hall. He also notes that Davison “spent most of his career in service to the writing of others — he was an editor of great skill and no small commercial instinct,” editing such books as William Least Heat Moon‘s Blue Highways and Robert Coles‘ The Spiritual Life of Children. “Through force of pen and personality,” says Murphy, “he was in fact one of the indispensable cultural figures in Boston.”