Colin Bramwell
Fetch
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 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.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- Watch Colin Bramwell read from Fetch on our YouTube channel.
- Learn more about Colin Bramwell and his work on his website here.
- Read an early version of ‘Birds are the Things with Feathers’ in London Magazine or ‘Fauna’ in New Statesman.
- Watch and hear Colin read another poem, ‘Maricruz Paredes’ as shared by the Scottish Poetry Library.
Author: Colin Bramwell
Format: B format paperback
Publication date: 8 September 2026
ISBN: 9781916751699
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751705
Reviews
Literary Hub
‘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.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola
The Guardian
‘By turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout . . . Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.’
Suzi Feay
Financial Times
‘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).’
Paul Farley
‘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.’
Alan Gillis
‘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.’
Niall Campbell
‘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.’
Kathleen Jamie & John Glenday
2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award
‘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.’
Stuart Kelly, on Fower Pessoas
The Scotsman
‘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.’