Fetch

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.