Chute, Robert (1926 - 2021)

Genre: Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction - Scholarly, Poetry

Robert Chute was born Feb. 13, 1926 in Bridgton, Maine and made his home in Poland, Maine.

He attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy, has a B.A. from the University of Maine (1950), and received his Doctor of Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1953. He has taught biology at Middlebury College, San Fernando Valley State College, and Lincoln University (PA) and is now Bates College Professor Emeritus of Biology, as well as director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, Phippsburg.

Chute was also a plumbing inspector and code enforcement officer in Mt. Vernon (ME) from 1976-1979.

Chute's scientific works focus on human ecology and culture's impact on lake and coastal ecosystems. He is also a poet whose poetry has frequently been published in the Beloit Poetry Journal. He was the fourth recipient of the journal's Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for his poem Heat Wave in Concord which was published in the Spring 1996 issue and focuses on Henry D. Thoreau's and a friend's cooling river escape from the heat. Chute's poem 'Sweeping the Skys,' won second prize in 1996 for the annual William and Kingman Page Chapbook Award granted by Potato Eyes Foundation, Troy, Maine.

Chute has written using the pseudonym L. W. Pond.

Selected Bibliography

Non-fiction

  • Environmental Insight: Readings and Comment on Human and Nonhuman Nature (1971)
  • Introductory Biology (1974) (later published as An Introduction to Biology in 1976)

Fiction

  • Roadside Rest: Another Maine Mystery from Wyman Falls (2012)

Poetry

  • Quiet Thunder: Poems from a Bates College Reading (1973)
  • The Uncle George Poems (1977)
  • Voices Great and Small (1977)
  • Thirteen Moons (1982), as three-language edition, which was published in French as Treize Lunes and in Passamaquoddy as 'Sanku Kisuhsok
  • Samuel Sewall Sails for Home: Poetry, Maine Arts Commission 1986 Chapbook Award winner
  • When Grandmother Decides to Die (1989)
  • Uncle George: Poems from a Maine Boyhood 1990)
  • Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems (1991)
  • Androscoggin Too: The Pejepscot Poems (1996)
  • Barely Time to Study Jesus: The Nat 'Turner' Revolt(1996).