Welcome to The Scotsman Sessions

With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman. com, with introductions by our critics.

Highlights so far include:

KT Tunstall performing her new song, Anything At All, from her home in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles

Scotland’s Makar Jackie Kay reading two lockdown poems, Still and Mask

Tam Dean Burn tackling the subject of Scotland’s salmon farming industry in an excerpt from his show Aquaculture Flagshipwreck

Scottish Chamber Orchestra cellist Su-a Lee playing Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in a forest near Grantown-on-spey

To watch, visit www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture

Originally from the Black Isle, Colin Bramwell is a poet, performer and translator who works in Scots and English. Most recently, he was a runner-up in the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, which rewards the best unpublished collections by writers under 30 years of age. His eagerlyanticipated new pamphlet The Highland Citizenship Test (Stewed Rhubarb, £5.99) arrives with Bramwell commenting that he hopes readers “will enjoy the various ‘between’ positions that it inhabits, linguistically and otherwise, which feel (perhaps accidentally) appropriate to our current situation vis a vis lockdown and perhaps reflect a general feeling, existent in Scotland and elsewhere, of waiting for something – anything – to happen.”

I leave my right arm out for your left hand. Time was I thought I was too young for this. Between us there’s the sea, an ampersand that separates our names. We’ve never kissed. But ever since I saw you from my own side of this crowded shore, I have been helpless.

I watch you speak, I watch your streets elide the shadows of your throat when night is moonless,

and mislead myself with thoughts of heaven. We will never kiss. Our lips are woven in the water where the stars go missing; in this way we’re only ever kissing.

Aye, you’re with another. I’m mistaken.

It still feels like anything could happen.

You can reserve a copy of The Highland Citizenship Test by Colin Bramwell at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh which is operating a click and collect service, reception@spl. org.uk, scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk