SWEEPING THE SKY

Robert M. Chute, a native of Naples, Maine, was educated, according to Chute, with varying degrees of success, at Fryeburg Academy, the University of Maine, and Johns Hopkins University. He served in the U.S. Air Force in WWII. In 1962 at Bates College he was Chairman of the Biology Department. Wearing his scientific hat, he wrote Introduction to Biology and Environmental Insight both published by Harper and Row. During the 1960s he produced and edited a mimeograph poetry magazine, The Small Pond. Research in and Professing of Biology supported his poetry habit until retirement from Bates College in 1993. During the Vietnam War he ran as an independent protest candidate for the U. S. House and continues as an active supporter of Veterans for Peace.

"Sweeping the Sky is one of the more unusual and intriguing chapbooks I've come across in Maine... Robert Chute's twenty-four poems pay tribute to a little-known historical subject: the female pilots who flew nighttime missions for the Soviet army during WWII....Concise and skillful, these poems are pulled off with surprising lightness of touch given their grim subject. Chute's poems make me want to look into their eyes-if I had the nerve." Haines Sprunt Tate, Maine Times, Sep. 21, 2000 About the Author: Robert M. Chute is a native of Naples, Maine and was educated, according to Chute, with varying degrees of success, at Fryeburg Academy, The University of Blaine, and The Johns Hopkins University. He served in the U.S. Air Force in WWII, in the Aviation Physiology Unit of a Proving Ground Command. Research in and Professing of Biology supported his poetry habit until retirement from Bates College in 1993. He received the Rhine Humanities Council chapbook award for Samuel Sewall Sails for Home and the Beloit Poetry Journal's Chad Walsh Award for the poem, "Heat Were in Concord." Chute was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Achievement Award by the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.