Run of the Horse
Gerry Cambridge founded The Dark Horse in 1995, only a few years after he started playing the diatonic harmonica. He was already an established poet, dedicated book collector and photographer. It’s hard to know which of these pursuits he’s most passionate about.
He sings and plays harmonica with singer-songwriter Neil Thomson, mixing poetry, music and performance but always has time for the Horse – he says he stands or falls by it. Every detail matters, from the clean-cut typography to the quality of the poetry and essays it carries. No pack animal, this is a high-stepping, well-bred beast.
Jennie Renton caught Gerry Cambridge on her canter round the Scottish Poetry Library Small Press Fair. In this textualities interview, he throws fresh light on The Dark Horse.
Selected Bibliography
Prose/Images in:
Camera, SLR Camera, Practical Photography, Amateur Photographer, The Countryman, Animal Life and Animals (formerly house magazines of the RSPCA) and Wildlife (now BBC Wildlife) and others.
Prose in:
Reader’s Digest, Scotland on Sunday, The Herald. Ten essays in the 3-volume Oxford Encyclopaedia of American Literature (2004), on: Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Derek Walcott, Jones Very, John Crowe Ransom, Robinson Jeffers, and The [American] New Formalism. 10,000-word essays on Les Murray, Anthony Hecht, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope, Iain Crichton Smith, Douglas Dunn, X. J. Kennedy, and G.F. Dutton, published in the British Writers and American Writers series by Charles Scribners’ Sons.
Poetry in:
The Spectator; The Hudson Review; The Independent; Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (2nd edition), ed. by Donny O’Rourke; The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poems, ed. by Douglas Dunn; A Book of Scottish Verse, ed. by Maurice Lindsay, etc.
©Jennie Renton
To find out more about Gerry Cambridge and The Dark Horse go to www.gerrycambridge.com
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