Books
Fower Pessoas
Fower Pessoas is a bold reimagining of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. Following his subject’s unique approach to composition, Colin Bramwell puts all four of Pessoa’s heteronyms into a present-day Scots-language vernacular, and so creates a parochial Pessoa for our own times. Fower Pessoas not only celebrates Pessoa’s extraordinary range of modes and moods, but also marks the arrival of an outstanding new talent in Scottish poetry.
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‘The original text by Pessoa shimmers in the background like a living moving ghost whilst Bramwell works his magic front stage. Bramwell’s new collection Fower Pessoas - translations into Scots of poems by Fernando Pessoa (or by four of his aliases/heteronyms) - could soon be considered a modern Scots language masterpiece.'
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.’
Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
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Buy Fower Pessoas here.
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beyond
A collection of the Skye poet aonghas macneacail's later English-language poetry, edited by Colin Bramwell and Gerda Stevenson, and published by Shearsman Books in Feb 2024.
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beyond was longlisted for the Highland Book Prize, and for the Saltire Award.
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'MacNeacail’s love of Nature is matched only by his writing on the varieties of human love, erotic, romantic, filial, parental, between friends. I can’t think of any other poet who’d compose 80 lines (both touching and hilarious) in praise of ‘some of my best friends’. Martyn Crucefix, Poetry Salzburg
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'Colin Bramwell, who had begun to work with him on it before MacNeacail’s death, completed the book with the help of his wife, the poet Gerda Stevenson. With Alasdair Gray’s 1973 portrait on the cover, Gray’s marginalia on the back and MacNeacail’s own handwritten poem from the time on the inside cover, it is a posthumous tribute to his polyglot skill.' Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman
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Buy beyond here.
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Decapitated Poetry
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being. Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry, this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.
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Decapitated Poetry won the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award.
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‘Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell have brought the two strains of Chen’s oeuvre into a dynamic tension, and their illuminating translators’ foreword reflects on the “fascinating interplay between queer identity and technology.” Though the content is so widely disparate, both halves of this volume contain the same vital assertions of selfhood.’—Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation.
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The Highland Citizenship Test
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The Highland Citizenship Test was my debut pamphlet, edited by the lovely James Harding and published in 2020 by Stewed Rhubarb Press.
'The Highland Citizenship Test by Colin Bramwell is an enjoyable and quite eclectic collection of poetry, good for a laugh and also a night of introspection on love, loss and family.' Sam Kidd, DURA
'This is an inventive set of poems. Every page is a surprise.' Maggie Mackay, Sphinx Review
The book is now out of print, but I still have copies - if you want one, contact me on my website.
