ISBN 978 1 904211 06 7
Edinburgh: Essence Press, March 2007

Pocket-sized paperback h 184 mm x w 123 mm
Typeset in Minion

Aves — the Latin name for the zoological class we know as Birds — becomes, without the 's', an expression both of welcome and of farewell. Aves is a lyrical yet clear-eyed flock of homages to the winged, beaked kingdom. Twenty-two prose poems offer glimpses into the world of wild birds and the psychology of watching them. The book includes 'A Dropped Feather', a personal essay about a lifelong fascination for these vivid creatures that hover and circle above, and dart through, our days.

'Cambridge's knowledge of the natural world, and the human world, is transmuted by the imagination into the kind of wisdom that only a good poet can express.' James Aitchison

'The exactness of Cambridge's attention to each bird, each word, transforms the nature poem into a unique kind of love poem. Here, the essential mystery of a being with a heartbeat that moves through leaves and light and time can be glimpsed on its way.' Ann Stapleton

'An honest-to-goodness makar.' TLS

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Perhaps writing poems is not altogether different in its anticipation from that sense I used to get, over quarter of a century ago, going out on a spring or an autumn morning, or a frosted winter night — that the world could briefly appear, by dint of a mote of feathered wildness, "astonishing again".

from 'A Dropped Feather'

'...these vibrant prose poems are so much more than leaves from a naturalist's notebook; the poet's vision has been adjusted by "the Cherub's Contemplation" to the degree that they have become "thoughts, with feathers on". Indeed, the observations are no static portraiture out of Audubon, but rather they hop and skip and take confident flight as the registers and metaphors are deftly manipulated from Latinate phrases to the demotic, swooping from high to low and up again, delighting the reader with what another poet-naturalist (and priest) would call the "inscape" of its subjects, as in "Corvus corone corone": "Hack-beaked, scale-legged, sponge of colours, with a blue, brillianteened sheen. A synonym for 'gloat'. Sacerdotally unsettling". Beautifully produced by Essence Press, these prose poems add a welcome dimension to the form.'

N.S. Thompson, TLS, June 29 2007