The House of Metaphor: Poems
Ebook
The poems in Pamela Cranston's The House of Metaphor are an intoxicating blend of spirit, edginess, gravity, play, and paradox, gifts we are given from a mind having what Einstein called "a holy curiosity." With subjects ranging from singing potatoes to angels and assassins, slave and master to moving recollections of her own childhood and her experience as a priest ministering to hospice patients, the book pulsates nonstop with the poet's vigor and variety, powered through her boundless imagination and lyrical intensity. Everywhere are surprises, and Cranston's choice words and marvelous metaphors seem to have been joyfully plucked from the heavens.
“‘Let’s hear it for history’s little people,’ Pamela Cranston writes, surely eliciting a smile from the reader. Actually, the admonition epitomizes something deeper in her work: the recovery of people otherwise ignored, their recreation through images both tender and firm. Resurrecting them, she pleads, ‘let my words be to you / like the green earth cherishing.’ Like burgeoning life for us, too, fortunate guests in The House of Metaphor she so blessedly builds.”
—Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia poet laureate emerita
“Pamela Cranston’s wonderful, accessible poems are a temple of metaphor. Her juxtapositions and never clichéd similes surprise and delight. Her penetrating insights engage the reader. Allusion to classical English poetry deepens the resonance of the work’s heart-truths. These are poems to revel in and ponder. To hurry through them would be like eating a box of fancy chocolates at one go. Don’t.”
—Bonnie Thurston, author of Saint Mary of Egypt
“Early in life, nature called to Pamela Cranston and sang. These poems show she has an ear for it, a studied gaze—an unhurried heart. She listens to people too, no one stereotyped, each incomparable, sent to her as if a poem. Cranston has the gift of paying attention, close and rapt, and then translates what she hears into poetry, helping us to hear and see— to become more human, more alive, somehow in the heart of God.”
—John S. Thornton, author of Moon and Fog
“Although she will deny it, Pamela Cranston is a mystic. For me, a mystic is someone who sees surfaces as rubble to dig through to find the truth, or truths, someone deeply in touch with depth(s), not just an onlooker, or even surveyor, but an inhabitant of what is most true, hence sacred. As someone who often finds it difficult to find light, I celebrate the luminescence of the poems in The House of Metaphor.”
—Tim Vivian, professor emeritus of religious studies, California State University Bakersfield
"Grief, love, fear, and peace: Pamela Cranston the chaplain bore witness to the immense spectrum of the human experience. Cranston the empath invites contemplation about the struggles and triumphs of people on the path to healing and transformation. Cranston the spiritual seeker ignites awakening to divinity by meditating on nature and the lives of saints. Through a lens of justice, Cranston the poet invokes a deliberate seeing and learning from 'galaxies full of gifts, stories, and dreams.'"
—Maileen Hamto, San Francisco Book Review
“A volume offers a wide range of lyrical poems. Cranston explores imagination, literary influences, memory, and mortality in this ambitious collection. ( … ) Many of these poems are cleverly crafted surprises. Cranston’s language is visually evocative, painting fantastical images with words. She describes bats ‘wrapped in thin leather cloaks’ and the ways bees ‘form a winged ladder / hanging down the sides / of waxy cubicles.’ There is also a subtle humor in her work, including in a striking poem about singing potatoes, inspired by a W.H. Auden quote. ( … )”
— Kirkus Reviews
- Title: The House of Metaphor: Poems
- Author: Pamela Cranston
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666760309, 9781666760286, 1666760285, 9781666760293, 1666760293, 1666760307
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666760309
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-05-09T22:54:13Z
Pamela Cranston is a retired Episcopal priest who has served parishes and hospices in the San Francisco Bay Area for over thirty-three years. She has written three books: The Madonna Murders (2003), Coming to Treeline: Adirondack Poems (2005), and Searching for Nova Albion (2019). She is a prize-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Blueline, Crosswinds Poetry, and Windhover. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Edward.