Gerry Cambridge

Gerry Cambridge is a poet, critic, essayist and editor with substantial interests in print design and typography as well as a background in natural-history photography. His publications include: Notes for Lighting a Fire (HappenStance Press, 2012), shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust’s book of the year award 2013; Aves (Essence Press, 2007), prose poems about wild birds; Madame Fi Fi’s Farewell and Other Poems (Luath Press, 2003); and ‘Nothing But Heather!’: Scottish nature in poems, photographs and prose (Luath Press, 1999). Seamus Heaney wrote, of his long poem ‘Blue Sky, Green Grass’ (winner of the Calum Macdonald memorial award in 2004): ‘it’s a wonderful paean, and allows in so much that the usual poem keeps out — sheer, archaic joy: hymns to light, praise of the creatures, tales of the usual, names of the people and the places’. The TLS, reviewing Notes for Lighting a Fire, wrote: ‘[Cambridge’s] poetry has something of Robert Frost’s tone and seriousness, but rings with a deeply personal Scottish resonance all its own.’

Since 1994 Gerry has published and edited The Dark Horse, a twice-yearly transatlantic poetry magazine with an international reputation. He conducts poetry workshops with people of all ages throughout Scotland. His writing is informed by a lifetime interest in British nature, a subject he specialised in as one of the youngest ever regular freelancers (between 1983 and 1988) for the magazine Reader’s Digest, which then sold 1.5 million copies a month.