In Celtic folklore a fetch is a shadowy doppelgänger that appears from the Otherworld, portending the beholder’s fate. Your fetch ‘fetches’ you to the afterlife, willingly or otherwise. Bramwell’s poetry uses the fetch as a model to explore a number of overlapping binaries - between the reader and the poem, most of all. Fetch also meditates on the differences between music and speech, the sacred and the profane, the written and the real, humanity and nature, Scots and English. Incorporating multitudes of modes, forms, registers and subjects, Bramwell converses with the Anglo-Celtic lyric tradition in our own time and in his own distinctively amiable fashion. In other words, this poet takes poetry seriously - but not too seriously.
Fetch is an astonishingly musical tour-de-force from one of Britain’s most exciting new poets, in which reverence and irreverence, religion and faithlessness, the living and the dead, nearly rhyme.
About the Author :
Colin Bramwell's poetry has been published widely in major poetry magazines and in his pamphlet The Highland Citizenship Test. He was the runner-up for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize, and his translations have won the John Dryden Translation Competition and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. From the Black Isle, he now lives in Edinburgh.
Review :
‘A wonderfully confident debut, alert to the faint absurdity of writing poems . . . Bramwell ranges well beyond the comic. Scottish dialect poems have a weight and purity (glossaries are provided).’ Suzi Feay, Financial Times
‘By turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout . . . Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.’ Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian
‘Bramwell’s debut is just fun to read. There is a musicality to his language, a willingness to embrace form when it suits and shed it when it doesn’t, that kept me coming back to read a few more poems before bed every night’ Literary Hub
