Everything Pure as Nothing by Patric Pepper

Opening a book of Patric Pepper’s poems is like opening a door and walking directly into a quirky, surprising mind. The company is congenial; the wisdom wry, the claims, disarmingly modest. You’ll find no heroic poetic posturing here, just a steady devotion to the time-honored task of poetry, which is, as Pepper reminds us in his evocation of Coltrane’s “distortion making / mirrors” to “catch us all exactly as we are / inside.”

—Jean Nordhaus

In Everything Pure as Nothing, Patric Pepper shovels his way down through thirty-five years of snow to get to the sidewalk, or as he puts it “to hack away the ice / at the bottom of it all.” He may have substituted “the driven snow” with “nothing” in his title, but snow is truly everything here. It is the vehicle whereby Pepper’s life—through his acute observations, quirky thoughts, laser-sharp focus, humor, pathos, and his prolific poetic styles (form, rhyme, free verse, etc.)—reveals itself. A collection not to be missed.

—Anne Harding Woodworth

In snow, Patric Pepper finds the vehicle by which the quirky everyman can be surprised, confounded, arrested, challenged, and comforted. This is poetry that can entertain as well as resonate with the reader’s own inner voice, poetry that ranges from ultra-talk to end rhyme, intimately sharing the human predicament. In this world of snow, he brings us evergreens “Buxom with heavy tufts.” He is the humane poet of the imagination.

  —Greg McBride