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Poets' A-Z » Gerry Cambridge
Gerry Cambridge was born in Morecambe, Lancashire in 1959 and has lived in Scotland since 1972, the first twenty five years here based in a caravan in Ayrshire. A former freelance journalist and natural history photographer, he founded the Scottish-American poetry magazine The Dark Horse in 1995 and was Brownsbank Writing Fellow from 1997-1999. While his primary focus is poetry he also plays traditional Celtic music and blues on harmonica, and his other interests include typography and book design, digital photography, and the natural world, especially birds; they often seem to fly in or out of his poems.

His work has appeared in the anthologies Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (Polygon, 2002), The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (Faber, 1992) and The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth Century Poetry (EUP, 2005). His poetry collections include The Shell House (Scottish Cultural Press, 1995), Madame Fi Fi’s Farewell and Other Poems (Luath, 2003), The Dynamite Project (North Ayrshire Council, 2005) and Light Up Lanarkshire (Clydeside Press, 2006). His pamphlet Blue Sky, Green Grass: A Day at Lawthorn Primary won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2004.

Light up lanarkshire Madame Fi Fi's Farewell

Related links

› Gerry Cambridge

› Gerry Cambridge at the Poem Tree

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.'

Gerry Cambridge, September 2006

Featured poem

The Pluffman
“What is a pluffman?” – question by a French woman, on reading the word “Ploughman”.

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.

Gerry Cambridge
from The Thing that Mattered Most (Black & White Publishing / Scottish Poetry Library, 2006)