Fetch

by Colin Bramwell

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 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.

96 pages, Paperback

Expected publication October 13, 2026

About the author

Colin Bramwell is a Scottish poet who writes and performs in Scots and English. He was born in Irvine, in Ayrshire, but grew up on the Black Isle. His first degree was in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, with a year abroad at McGill University. His masters degree was in eighteenth century English literature, from the University of Oxford. His doctorate at the University of St. Andrews was in Creative Writing; for this he wrote on the methods and meanings of translating poetry into Scots in the present day.

His publications include The Highland Citizenship Test (Stewed Rhubarb, 2021), Decapitated Poetry (co-translations of Taiwanese poet Ko-hua Chen, Seagull Books, 2023), and beyond (edited collection of Aonghas MacNeacail's later English-language poetry, Shearsman, 2024). His book of Scots translations of Fernado Pesssoa, Fower Pessoas was published in April 2025.

Bramwell won the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition for his translations of the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu. Decapitated Poetry received the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

He now lives in Edinburgh with his partner Eva Paredes and their son Pablo.