The House of Metaphor: Poems

By Pamela Cranston

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666760309

Pamela Cranston

Pamela Cranston is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of California, and the author of The Madonna Murders (2003) and Coming to Treeline: Adirondack Poems (2005). She has served several San Francisco Bay Area churches and hospices for the past thirty years. She lives with her husband, Edward, in Oakland, California.

Book preview

The House of Metaphor

Poems

Pamela Cranston

The House of Metaphor

Poems

Copyright ©

2023

Pamela Cranston. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-6028-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-6029-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-6030-9

version number 031523

Table of Contents

TITLE PAGE

REVIEWS

PERMISSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WASHING HANDS WITH FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

MY MUSE

THE HOUSE OF METAPHOR

ABANDONED

PHANTOM MAIL

PIG LAZARUS or the END of Bar-B-Que

SINGING POTATOES

ROAD INSTRUCTIONS

TAKING TOLL

BEAVER MEADOW FALLS

A POEM FOR CONNOR MCLAUGHLIN

MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT BATS

THE LINCHPIN

THE HUNGRY HEART

TWENTY-TWENTY VISION

MY GRANDFATHER’S TYPEWRITER

MY PARENTS’ WEDDING PHOTO, 1950

WHAT WATER DOES

UNCLE JACK, HOME FROM BOOT CAMP

THE HIDING PLACE

LEAVING CAMP

THE COPLAND SUITE

FOOLING DEATH

MY FATHER’S LAST CHRISTMAS, 2016

TIPPING POINT

A MURDER OF CROWS

FIRE IN PARADISE

THE FIRST CIRCLE OF HELL

DARKNESS AT NOON

THE ASSASSIN

BARBWIRE BABY JESUS

AT ST. ANTHONY’S SOUP KITCHEN

COMING TO THE TABLE

FOOTWASH BAPTISTS OF BOYLE COUNTY

I WOKE TO HEAR A RAVEN SING

OWL, FISHING AT NIGHT

THE LATHE OF JOY

SNOWY OWL

ARRIBADA: THE OLIVE RIDLEY SEA TURTLES ARRIVE

NIGHT OF TWO MOONS

THE BELL RINGERS OF BREDWARDINE

OUR LADY BURNING, APRIL 2019

DEAD LETTER DROP

BEGGAR’S FEAST

SAYING MASS WITH ANGELS

WHEN A SAINT GROWS OLD

THE JONAH COMPLEX

CAPEL-Y-FfIN

ODE TO VELÁZQUEZ’S DWARF AND OTHERS

A VISITATION

IN A DARK WOOD

LINES INSPIRED BY BACH’S LAST FUGUE

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

COMPLINE, GETHSEMANI ABBEY, 1973

THE TOUCHSTONE

THE LURE FROM A DISTANT ROOM

WIDOW’S MITE

Pietà

THE REAL WORK

HOW TRUE POEMS BEGIN

WHEN I’M AN OLD WOMAN

QUIRKY PAINTINGS OF CHRIST’S ASCENSION

LOVE’S NECESSITY

ST. FRANCIS XAVIER MISSION

SABBATH SOIL

PRAYER

WHAT BODY?

MASSAGE SESSION

AT THE VILLA

THE LATECOMER

THE ZEN OF DYING

GOD’S SLOW ANSWER

ALL I CAN DO

MORTAL SHAME

LOST

I THOUGHT IT WAS A TOILET

FLOATING NOWHERE FAST

SWIMMING LESSON

DYING TIME

ANNA’S RISING

AUTOPSY

NO MORE BE GRIEVED

BLOSSOMING INTO LIGHT

GOING HOME TO SPRINGTOWN

DYING IS A WILD NIGHT

ODE TO TEX MCKLEAN

CROSSING THE LINE

KADDISH POEM

ELEGY FOR LYNDSEY

NOTES

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Reviews

"‘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, author of The Consequence of Moonlight

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.

—Bishop John S. Thornton

Co-founder of the Hospice of Marin, 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

Also by Pamela Cranston

Poetry

Coming to Treeline: Adirondack Poems

Searching for Nova Albion

Nonfiction

An Eccentric English Journey (Limited Edition)

Clergy Wellness and Mutual Ministry

Love Was His Meaning: An Introduction to Julian of Norwich

A Spiritual Journey with John Donne

Fiction

The Madonna Murders

For my husband Ed, with much love and gratitude.

With you, home is not just a house

but wherever I am with you.

Unless you are at home in the metaphor . . . you are not safe anywhere.

—Robert Frost, Education by Poetry

"Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process. The mind is a plastic snow dome, the most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself, when, as Elvis put it, it’s all shook