5th Place Winner of the 2020 Writer's Digest Poetry Contest and a Semi-finalist in the 2020 National Poetry Society of Virginia Poetry Contest
The title Searching for Nova Albion comes from a pilgrimage Pamela Cranston, an Episcopal priest, once made to Drake's Beach near Point Reyes, California. There, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed the first English ship in North America, which he called Nova Albion (New Britain). The title poem is a protest against abuses of the environment and of power, wherever and whenever they happen.
Inspired by the works of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, David Scott, and Rowan Williams, the author aspires to follow in their footsteps as a fellow poet-priest. Searching for Nova Albion displays a distinctive kind of spiritual sensibility found both within twentieth century English classical music and the Northern California landscape.
These poems display a love for the roots and beauty of the English language, as well as an appreciation for the mystical, but also keep a critical eye to question, laugh with, or doubt Christian tradition. Common themes that arise are unexpected encounters with nature and the numinous; questions about life, death, and eternity; writing and finding one's voice; dealing with loss and defeat; and the recompense of joy.
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.
“The poet writes of a snowy egret fluttering down like a dropped handkerchief. She has the gift of acute perception, of finding ways to focus on the individual, lived-in encounters that seem to flow naturally into her life. She listens for the arboreal songs of the redwood forest, the whine of a buzz saw, the dark messages of stones, the confetti of laughter. It is her poetic practice to observe detail so that the events in her search for meaning open and reveal themselves. This is soul poetry of the highest order.”
—Luci Shaw, author of Eye of the Beholder, Writer in Residence, Regent College
“Early in this resonant collection, Pamela Cranston offers this wise counsel. Having described the snowy egret, she says: ‘like a seer with piercing eye / probing the heart of things. / This is how a poet should walk the earth.’ The advice is sustained by poems that pay homage to detail and by the tenderness in Cranston’s observance of faith, as she traces its imprint in walls and pathways, monuments and things, history and heart. Happy are we who, drawn to pilgrimage, would take this poet as our guide.”
—Sofia M. Starnes, Poet Laureate of Virginia, Emerita; author of The Consequence of Moonlight
"Reading the poems in Pamela Cranston's Searching for Nova Albion, I realized that there's something essentially miraculous about them. Having walked around in half-darkness in broad daylight, one, such as I, sees things otherwise not seen, but for the alerting language of her seeing. Nature is transformed. People too. Poem by poem, you will feel yourself being changed as well. Not to exaggerate, it is essentially miraculous.”
—The Rt. Rev. John S. Thornton, XI Bishop of Idaho, retired
“To read Pamela Cranston’s poems, as with all good poetry, is to be alive. Cranston offers us in Searching for Nova Albion, poem by poem, a guided tour of the spiritual life—that is, how to see, be in, the world spiritually. The back of the book tells us that Cranston “aspires to follow” in the “footsteps as a fellow poet-priest” of such luminaries as George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, David Scott, and Rowan Williams. One could suppose that the statement above is overreaching, but such a supposition would be incorrect. Cranston speaks to us, just John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Denise Levertov (the first two Anglican, the last Roman Catholic), and others can still inform our lives. I hope that Cranston’s publisher will nominate her book for poetry prizes. I’m not optimistic how a faith-based book of poems will fare these days, but the venture will be worth the sailing.”
—Dr. Tim Vivian, California State University Bakersfield
In Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 54.4, 2019, pp. 492-3.
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