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Poets'
A-Z » Gerry Cambridge
Gerry Cambridge is a poet, essayist, editor and harmonica player with interests in print design and typography as well as a background in natural history photography. His publications include Aves (Essence Press, 2007), a collection of prose poems about wild birds; Madame Fi Fi's Farewell and Other Poems (Luath, 2003); and ‘Nothing but Heather!': Scottish Nature in Poems, Photographs and Prose (Luath, 1999). His poetry is anthologized in The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2000) and The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2005).
Since 1994 Gerry has published and edited The Dark Horse, a Scottish-American poetry magazine with an international reputation. He was the 1997-1999 Brownsbank Writing Fellow, based at Hugh MacDiarmid's former home near Biggar in Lanarkshire, and has worked with schools and community groups throughout Scotland
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Related links
Books I love
An old favourite
'There are hundreds of them! But among dozens of others I remember having a lengthy period of infatuation with Robert Frost's work, especially valuing his independence of mind, the 'out-on-the-edgeness' of the earlier work, in particular, which was very important to me as a poet in a caravan in Ayrshire in the 1980s, as well as the impression his work gives of its maker resolutely following his own mental processes in a non-programmatic way: Frost's quirky, universal-in-the-local vision married to his wonderful command of verse form and the classical elegance of his verse line.'
A new favourite
'Again, there are plenty of them, and they would include numerous poets I have published in The Dark Horse. But for sheer out and out rhythmical energy and power, and because I heard the poet read from it astonishingly at West Chester in Pennsylvania in 2000, I'd pick B. H. Fairchild's collection The Art of the Lathe for two poems, 'Beauty', and 'Body and Soul'. The second is an epic narrative in 110 lines, ostensibly about a working men's baseball
game in post-Depression America, but really about an old style masculinity involving restraint and dignity which Fairchild manages to make seem not at all cloying or Disney-ish (though it would make a great scene in a film).'
A current interest
'Among my current interests are a fascination for typography, design, and the world of printing and finishing.'
Featured poem
The Pluffman
A pluffman is a man whose pluff
Is not quite sharp enough
To slice the soil like the shining blade
Of the genuine plough, on the winter days.
A pluffman’s not a rough man
And certainly not a tough man
Nor (usually) a gruff man.
He fears he may be a duff man,
Poor pluffman,
One of a kind.
While on every field bright tractors go
The pluffman just looks down at his pluff
And shakes his head. He can huff and puff,
It’ll make no difference. Who made this pluff,
He asks himself, out of such useless stuff?
He can’t get started, even. The hopeless pluff
Sits and gazes at him with one bright eye,
Incurious creature with a thick buff ruff
Made out of fluff, and its only sound is – wuff.
And what is why
I made the poor pluffman this poem to live in –
He’d not get far in the actual world.
The pluffman’s pluff is not plough enough.
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