Nothing but Heather

by Gerry Cambridge

Enter the world of Scottish nature through poetry and the camera lens. Cambridge brings an unusual focus to bear on lives as diverse as those of dragonflies, hermit crabs, short-eared owls, and wood anemones. The result is both an instructive look by a naturalist at some of the flora and fauna of Scotland and a poet's aesthetic journey. This exceptional collection comprises 48 poems matched with 48 captioned photographs.

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

Gerry Cambridge lives in Ayr, Scotland. He co-edits Spectrum. His six books of poetry include Notes for Lighting a Fire (2012) and The Light Acknowledgers & Other Poems (2019), both from HappenStance Press. He founded The Dark Horse, Scotland’s leading poetry journal, in 1995. He is also an essayist, print designer, typographer, and former nature photographer. He continued to live in a caravan in Ayrshire, adjacent to the one mentioned in this account, from 1977–1997, then left to become Brownsbank Fellow in MacDiarmid’s former home for 1997–1999. As a critic he contributed ten essays to the four-volume Oxford Encyclopaedia of American Literature (2004) and wrote nine 12,000-word monograph essays for the Gale/Charles Scribner’s Sons textbook series British Writers and American Writers between 2000 and 2006. 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 The Reader’s Digest magazine, which at the time (the 1980s) had a monthly circulation of 1.5 million copies. An Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literature, he received a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry, administered by the Society of Authors in London, in June 2024. The Ayrshire Nestling is his first book of creative prose.