A Day In The Republic
By Tim Suermondt
Dos Madres Press
Loveland, Ohio
ISBN: 978-1-962847-42-1
82 Pages
$20.00
Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly
Retying a shoelace in poetic terms can make all the difference. Tim Suermondt in his new book entitled A Day In The Republic celebrates the ordinary progression of life’s footsteps through geography and time. Suermondt, a veritable Everyman, conveys the wonder of inexhaustible routine in poem after poem. His commonplace images surprise with their hidden possibilities and seem to magically flower with each touch or sympathetic attention by the reader.
Clean lines, decency, and simplicity, masking a more complicated reality, dominate Suermondt’s pieces. This straightforward technique propels an imagination of hopefulness and idiosyncratic comfort.
Suermondt’s poetry paean to bar culture, Kennedy’s, salutes the collective way many drinkers sort out or think they sort out their private lives. A close friend of the poet is in love and he has come to Kennedy’s to affirm his new status among friends and familiar furnishings. The tone is upbeat and admiring. The poet says,
… The clamor at the bar
matches the clamor of the city—
this is where we go to take stock,
to repair. To celebrate even better.
All the voices that insist they can change
the world and themselves, words
and beer on lips beautiful and on lips
chapped hard by having to come
from behind just to hang on for dear life—
the photos of the martyred president
watch us from the walls, lamps shining
like little moons, my good friend
luminous in his rumpled suit…
When a poet manages to exude optimism in theses tumultuous times, his readership and beyond should take note. In his poem We All Move On, Somehow, Suermondt deals with the closing of his stalwart hardware store that he has patronized for twenty-five years. Aha a routine broke, you might remark. But this poet, this champion of the ordinary, takes the disappointing news in stride and gives his poem a positive twist. Here is the heart of the piece,
“Can I still buy a big wrench set today,” I say
trying a little positivity. “Buy three,” he says
“and I’ll kiss you on the cheek.”
I buy two and he still insists on giving
me a discount. I thank him and he thanks me,
sunlight on the cash register. I carry my wrench sets,
one under each arm, thinking I’m set for life…
A Day in the Republic, Suermondt’s title poem, details a state of mind. Sometimes believing all’s right with the world can lead to exactly that. Yes, belief can be efficacious. The poet and his wife traverse a friendly city and return to their abode. They seem comfortably in love. At the end of their route, before supper, they espy a nearby park with its embedded problems. But not today. The poet concludes his poem with the highest hopes,
…We make
it back to our front door, in time
to join the dusk as it turns to darkness—
the tiny park almost emptied out,
a police siren, but everyone has been good
and not afraid of asking about justice.
A bit of liquor, cooking on the stove—
my wife and I waiting on the bushel
of stars the weatherman says will come.
Life lived at the ordinary level, when stalling into sluggishness, revolts and spices-up or romanticizes reality. Imagination enables this non-violent phenomenon of sublimation. In Suermondt’s piece entitled Hotel Odessa, the poet daydreams a world of intrigue, which constructs excitement out of nothing and (although often disturbing) physically disturbs no one. Of course, this is what poetry often does. The poem opens with verve,
On my first morning in Paris
I paused at my apartment window,
holding a croissant and a mug of coffee
and watching people go in and out
of the hotel’s entrance, convinced each one
of them was a spy, good and bad—
how the imagination of youth
still clings at the age we should know better.
Minutes later I got fully clothed\
and made my way to the hotel’s small
lobby, hoping a man with a pronounced
scar or a woman whose beauty is timeless
would show me a folder and say:
“You must get this to the American embassy
in Prague by midnight…
The poet, in his piece The Runners Go by the Apartment, logically mulls over his Everyman role as a spectator, albeit in comparatively great comfort, but also without conceding the hope of artistic immortality. Alas, there are many struggling (or not so struggling) poets in the same boat. Even as academic elitism has been brought to heel, other political hierarchies have popped up with their associated tyrannies. Suermondt puts it this way,
But I’m waiting to see the runners
who will pass by differently, runners of every shape
who will have many go from running
to jogging to walking, some who will
bend over, their hands grabbing their knees
as if begging the earth to filter up a stream of air,
those laters and last of the pack who ask
how they keep thinking they might win one day—
impossible, impossible, until next year for them…
Tim Suermondt’s gentle poems wash over his readers with their lightness and ease. When you think you’ve finished reading, you realize you haven’t and go back to his metaphoric, yet satisfying, surface and stay for a while. It can be illuminating—like life.