Everything Pure as Nothing

Patric Pepper's Everything Pure as Nothing is a selection from his poems written about snow over a 35 year period. Snow, the central metaphor of the collection, engenders a wide range of emotions and understandings. For Pepper, snow in all its elusiveness and innocence occasions joy and sadness, wonder and bewilderment, love and physical pain, indifference and engagement, and a yearning for faith in the face of true skepticism. The snow of this small accessible volume is emblematic of both human and absolute reality in an unpretentious and pleasing way. The collection begins with poems written as late as 2015, and then surprisingly skips back through the years to poems written in the 1980s. The work ranges from free verse to sonnets, ultra-talk to unadulterated verse, rhyme and meter to simple conversation. Pepper demonstrates a mastery of his forms, which are never rigid or lockstep, but rather supple and contemporary. A sensitive reader will notice how his content is supported by his chosen forms in a functional and agreeable manner. This is a good read you won't want to miss if you are interested in the possibilities for breadth and depth in contemporary poetry.