Mark Turpin
Mark Turpin's first full-length collection, Hammer, published by Sarabande Books, won the Ploughshares' Zacharis First Book Award in 2004. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Slate among others; they have been read on the PBS News Hour (for Labor Day) and by Garrison Keillor for The Writer's Almanac. His work appears in many anthologies, and is also embedded in a Berkeley sidewalk as part of the Addison Street Anthology, selected by Bob Hass. He is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He received a Masters in Poetry from Boston University at age forty seven, otherwise, he has spent thirty years working construction and building houses. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.
-
HammerPoemsFrom"The Box"
Maybe he pictured just the nail,
the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised
the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill
and sank it with a single blow.
Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder
than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof
or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,
a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.
Hammer:Poems -
HammerPoemsFrom"The Day"
Again you found yourself hoping for the last day,
to be like a man whose debts are paid and rises
with the sun to walk to work alone through a green valley.
The birds he cannot name, the sun shines as he remembered
it did. His shoes kick up tiny clouds of dust on the path.
He hums idly and carries his coat under his arm.
He thinks of a lewd joke to tell his wife in the kitchen,
vows to spend more time with his children. How wonderful,
he thinks it is, to be a righteous man.
Hammer:Poems -
HammerPoemsFrom"Nailer"
Although it is a Sunday
across a cleared tract
of mud and standing water about the space of Disneyland
where dots of birds pick singly
and huge yellow CAT’s and backhoes wait in Titan postures –
a carpenter, a pieceworker
is nailing on the solitary gray square of a new foundation,
flopping the plywood sheets down on the joists,
his hammer winking across the mud-brown expanse
and music from a parked pickup,
no walls yet, more like a dance floor than a house.
Hammer:Poems
