235mm H x 155mm W
244pp

 

 

There is a limited edition hardback version of this product, click here to view.

 

 

Raised from his early teens in North Ayrshire, where he lived in a caravan for twenty-five years, Gerry Cambridge is also an essayist, print designer, typographer, and former nature photographer. In his mid-twenties he was, as far as he knows, one of the youngest-ever regular freelancers—specialising in nature articles—for the UK edition of Reader’s Digest magazine, which at the time (the 1980s) had a monthly circulation of 1.5 million copies. He is the founder-editor of The Dark Horse, Scotland’s leading poetry journal, which began in 1994. After many years spent elsewhere, he returned to live on the North Ayrshire coast of his upbringing in 2020. An Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literature, he received a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry from the Society of Authors in London in 2024. His The Ayrshire Nestling, a memoir of growing up in the county, was shortlisted for the Saltire Non-fiction Book of the Year Award in autumn 2025.

 

Light Leaves: Selected Poems is a gathering of over thirty years’ work from Gerry Cambridge’s seven published collections to date, from his first slim volume, The Shell House in 1995, to his most recent collection The Light Acknowledgers & Other Poems, in 2019. Of that first book, published when Cambridge was 36, the critic Mario Relich noted, ‘[he writes] in a way quite remote from young contemporary poets who tend to stray not very far from popular culture, class resentments and streetwise wise-cracking. A radically different world is conveyed...’. In his Cholmondeley Award citation in 2024, ‘Gerry Cambridge’s publications’, wrote the poet-critic Lachlan Mackinnon, ‘have often been fugitive, in limited or private editions...’; Light Leaves indeed, and leaves are light, in numerous ways: this volume gives readers, for the first time, the chance to see the full range of Cambridge’s work, over more than three decades, between two covers.

 

From reviews of Cambridge's poetry

 

‘...poetry of an extraordinary quality [...] as fresh as the coldest air of a winter’s night.’

 

—Alison Brackenbury, New Walk Magazine

 

‘The language is simple, the effect beautiful, the craft-work sure. There is no affected elegance here, only a genuine elegance in the linguistic operation of almost every line.’

 

—John Foy, Contemporary Poetry Review

 

 

‘The best of [Cambridge’s poems]—many more than a handful—have a brand of slow, ruminative wisdom that sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. His poetry has something of Robert Frost’s tone and seriousness, but rings with a deeply personal Scottish resonance all its own.’

 

—Rory Waterman, The Times Literary Supplement

 

 

‘What is most apparent is the freshness of the work, executed in a beautifully controlled diction that has no postmodern blips and squibs in it and whose sentiment is blessedly free of irony, postmodern or postlapsarian. There are no histrionics about self and identity; there is no anger; there are no diatribes...’

 

—N. S. Thompson, Oxford Poetry

 

 

‘Coinages like “millioned” and “skinkling”, sometimes from Scots dialect, are part of the texture of Cambridge’s verse. They reflect his physical involvement with the Scottish landscape, mainly in the west in Ayrshire, but also as far afield as the Orkneys. I haven’t seen a poet as involved in registering the natural stirrings and startlings of the world around him in a long time [...] I finished the book wondering why I didn’t know about this poetry, in which birds on their nests are spoken of as “ovening to life the dotted eggs” and dragonflies, “the larvae of glaur”, give birth to themselves, “anchored to stems”, “having crawled up/ to the bending blue/of a new existence”...’

 

—Mark Jarman, The Hudson Review

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