Fetch - by Colin Bramwell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An exceptional Scottish debut, Fetch stands out for its formal dexterity, linguistic hybridity and playfulness - Bramwell takes the lyric seriously, but not too seriously.

In Celtic folklore a fetch is a shadowy doppelganger 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 a tour-de-force debut from one of Britain's most exciting new poets, in which reverence and irreverence, religion and faithlessness, the living and the dead, nearly rhyme.

Review Quotes

"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 audacious, caustic, erudite, playful, enchorial, mischievous, inventive, yearnful, wildly funny - one of the tightest and most spirited debuts I've come across in ages." --Paul Farley

"Mixing Scots and English, lyric nuance with great formal invention, Bramwell is funny, super-skilled and ardent. While wide-ranging, voicing the many sides of the self and this strange world in which we find ourselves, he constantly hits home. This is verse that keeps down to earth with great panache and ambition. Here, rooted Scottish poetry and world literature are synonyms. Fetch is a blast." --Alan Gillis

"This collection is long overdue and well worth the wait. Colin Bramwell's Fetch shows off every part of the intelligence, ingenuity and imagination of one of our very best new poets." --Niall Campbell

"What a celebration and selection we are offered. Bramwell masters everything from the prose poem to the villanelle to daring, accumulative poems; there are snatches of dramatic verse and witty tilts at the Scottish character. There are even remarkable open translations into Scots from Latin American and Chinese poets." --John Glenday and Kathleen Jamie, 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award

"Fower Pessoas is a revelation, and shows just how strong Scots poetry can be. What is exceptional is that Bramwell fashions distinct, plural Scots for Pessoa's different heteronyms. The chutzpah is amazing." --Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

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.