Search and Rescue: Poems

L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award

by Michael Chitwood

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.

82 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2018

Reviews

[George Hovis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In SEARCH AND RESCUE, Michael Chitwood plumbs the depths of our lives for all that we have unthinkingly abandoned--modes of speech, of work, of worship--as we move relentlessly into the future. These poems enter what feels like a collective memory, meditating on absence until it fills to the brim with living presence.