Poems for Company - April 28th, 2025

“Gifts”: One poet recalls her complex strategies as a teen gift-giver, a second recalls the gift his parents bestowed on him when he was eleven and about to move away from home, and the third imagines the circumstances in which her father gave a gift to her mother before they were married, before they became her parents. Brenda Shaughnessy, “A Mix Tape: ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me),'” from So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Seamus Heaney, “The Conway Stewart,” from Selected Poems 1988-2013 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Eavan Boland, “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me,” from Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (W, W....