In Search and Rescue, Michael Chitwood seeks what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, the poet meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand. Water anchors the collection with the title poem, which explores the history of a large manmade lake and how it changes the surrounding mountain community. Displaying keen narrative skills and an engaging voice, the poems in Search and Rescue pay homage to Whitman and Dickinson, to Heaney and Wright, in pursuit of the everyday grace of Appalachian culture and the natural landscape.
Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Michael Chitwood lives and works as a writer and teacher in Chapel Hill, NC.
Michael Chitwood’s intense attention to the physical allows us into luminous spaces between sensation and imagination where one registers awareness beyond thought. As the poems of Search and Rescue penetrate the mysteries of unspoken experience, they steady us to watch, listen, smell, taste, touch what can be discovered in the barns and fields and machine shops of unnamed lives.
~Debra Nystrom
A regional poet who speaks to the whole history and culture of America, Michael Chitwood is a modest genius. Search and Rescue showcases a major American poet in the making.
~David Huddle
Michael Chitwood has long been one of my favorite poets, but this new volume has a range of technique and subject matter that takes his work to a whole new level. Search and Rescue is magnificent.
~Ronald Rash