Synopses & Reviews
Nestucca Spit Press announces the release of
Newported, a Poetic Field Guide to the Pacific Coast, a book of poems by Tim Sproul
The work is uniquely accompanied by a CD of song poems produced by celebrated musician Mike Coykendall. It features Sproul reciting poems with musicscapes created by Willy Vlautin, Coykendall and others. Coykendall has produced albums for Richmond Fontaine, M Ward, She & Him, and Bright Eyes.Vlautin fronts Richmond Fontaine, the Delines and is an award winning novelist.
Newported, a Poetic Field Guide to the Pacific Coast, goes where most poetry fears to go — the heart of the real characters, dark bars and magically dangerous beaches of the Pacific Coast.
Oregon Book Award winner Willy Vlautin says "Tim Sproul is the only poet who can recite a poem in a bar and get free drinks instead of getting killed. He's my poet laureate of the Northwest." Nestucca Spit Press Publisher Matt Love declaims, "Tim Sproul is the Steve Prefontaine of Oregon poetry. His kick down the stretch delivering a poem is legendary."
Famed poet Garrett Hongo is effusive with praise saying, "Newported is a spirited and lovely tribute to his native Oregon Coast and its ethos. Its rich and vibrant language borrows liberally from the vocabulary of a teenage head-banger, from surf culture, and from the barroom jocularity of seasonal fisherman and party-boaters, yet joins these with the rhetorical swell of lyric poetry and a vision of the American sublime."
Newported is Sproul's third book of poems and he celebrates what it means to get Newported — formally defined in the book's first poem as..."...to experience a slighting...or unexpected joy....brought on by cultural and geographical isolation....born of provincialism, rain, rugged individualism and Walmart."
While firmly rooted in the Oregon Coast, the poems get at formative things, the most universal of our concerns, those people and places from our past and in the moment of right now, that shape us into who we are constantly becoming, for better or worse. It's poetry for real people, large-hearted free verse meant to be sung aloud in dark bars and sunny beaches, not in the stuffy halls of academia.
In the collection's 22 poems, readers will meet Terry, a tough luck fisherman with a surprisingly warm heart, learn how to avoid the trappings of "clamless clam chowder," explore tidepools that release the inner child, and interact with "Newport's weather-hard royalty" who suffer and celebrate endless days of grey and stunning beauty with shots of Fireball.
About the Author
Tim Sproul is the author of Home to Leave Your Hometown for Good and is working on his second novel. He has published poems in Rattle, Zone 3, Rain and The Oregonian. He lives in Milwaukie, Oregon.