Hammer

One of the root meanings of the word "poet is "maker. In "Hammer we encounter the poems of a man who has obviously made not only the words at hand, but physical things--rooms, houses, buildings--in the world. Mark Turpin has made his living for the past twenty-five years as a carpenter and construction worker, and his debut collection offers a rare and profound view of manual labor's laconic, and largely male, world. In exciting contrast to the exhausted self-reference of much postmodern art, these poems are "about something: a way of life that's well understood outside the classroom, but little mentioned within. In poems with titles like "Laborer's Code, " "Last Hired, " "Waiting for Lumber, " "Sledgehammer's Song, " and "Finish Work, " Turpin renders, with precision and unsentimental passion, the honor and dignity, as well as the tedium and the small, everyday humiliations, of physical labor. But Turpin is no "noble savage--his work has been highly praised by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Thom Gunn, Philip Levine, and others, and his poems have appeared in the best literary magazines. His poems create, perhaps out of the necessity of a new subject, an idiom and diction largely missing from contemporary American poetry. "Hammer is to carpentry what "A Boy's Will was to farming. Wherever Turpin's art takes him next, it's likely many will follow, with pleasure and gratitude.