Push the Boat Out review: 'the work of younger poets shone through'

The Push the Boat Out poetry festival spread out across the capital for its fourth edition, writes Joyce McMillan

Hannah Lavery

Disrupting The Narrative, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Iona Fyfe And Friends, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh ★★★★

Push The Boat Out: Living Water, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh ★★★

At just four years old, Push The Boat Out is perhaps Edinburgh’s youngest Festival. Named for a line from an Edwin Morgan poem, adopted by Summerhall, and now - as Summerhall fights for its life - spread around city centre venues from the Pleasance to Dancebase, PTBO bills itself as “Scotland’s International Poetry Festival”; and this year’s event involves dozens of poets, musicians and songwriters from across the UK and Ireland.

It’s often the subject of Edinburgh itself, though - and its own dramatic history, reflected by an exceptional generation of younger poets working in Scotland - that shines through most clearly in this year’s Festival; and nowhere more so than in Hannah Lavery’s Disrupting The Narrative.

The aim of the Disrupting The Narrative project is to decolonise Edinburgh’s history - that is, to look with fresh eyes at the sources of the wealth that built such a beautiful city, and at the consequences of the UK’s long and lucrative imperial history for the peoples it colonised and exploited.

Together with composer Niroshini Thambar, Hannah Lavery - as Edinburgh’s outgoing city Makar - has therefore brought together five poets of colour with different, shifting perspectives on this story.

So there’s Niall Moorjani’s direct and witty confrontation with Scotland’s protestations of innocence over an imperial past in which Scots played such an enthusiastic part. There’s Shasta Ali’s beautiful meditation on the fate of South Asian “ayahs” or nursemaids who served with British families. There’s Jeda Pearl’s hugely emotional reimagining of a letter from a young black slave in Scotland to his dear friend, who has been brutally punished for trying to escape; there are Alycia Pirmohamed’s careful, magnificently thoughtful poems written from the perspective of an Asian American living and studying in Edinburgh.

And from Lavery herself, there are beautiful, brooding lyrics full of profound feeling for the very stones and alleyways of the city that gave her birth, and welcomed her - and her black father - so ambiguously. The whole event is backed by moody and powerful monochrome images of a deconstructed Edinburgh by Kat Gollock; and it deserves an even wider audience than the enthusiastic packed house it drew to the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Friday night.

Billed as the festival’s celebratory Saturday-night gig, Iona Fyfe and Friends at the Dovecot Studios featured a fine mix of music and poetry; although in truth, the setting could hardly have been less festive, as a tiny audience of a few dozen strung itself out around the viewing gallery of the Dovecot’s main studio space, wrapped in coats against the cold, and struggling to see the performers, perched at the far end.

Some of the work on view, though, was truly magnificent, with poet Iona Lee and DJ Nikki Kent offering further insight into the deep contradictions of contemporary Edinburgh - Warriston Cemetery, other haunted places - along with rich, sensual and highly entertaining reflections on the life of a young 2020s woman.

Musicians Emma Capponi and Fionnbar Byrne followed, creating exceptional patterns of sound with voice, flute, whistle, box and guitar, as they explored the moodier depths of the Scottish, English and Irish folk traditions, transmitted and re-transmitted around the globe.

And then finally, in flash of energy an glamour, came Fyfe herself - activist, singer, songwriter, and newly elected Rector of Aberdeen University - surfing every aspect and reinvention of the Scottish song and ballad tradition like a mariner of huge knowledge and experience, yet nonetheless still full of the energy, beauty and glorious vocal flexibility of youth.

In a 50-minute set, with Michael Biggins on keyboard, she began with Macpherson’s Rant and finished with The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen, but covered multitudes in between; and if it felt, at the Dovecot, as if almost everyone had already left for a party elsewhere, it was still clear that what they were missing was exceptional, and truly precious.

The atmosphere was much cosier on Sunday night, though, as the Scottish Storytelling Centre provided a perfect, supportive space - and a packed audience - for the festival’s final event. Co-commissioned by Push The Boat Out and the National Theatre of Scotland, Living Water was a quintessential evening of experimental performance, in which three poets were invited to interact with practitioners of other art forms to create special new short performance events of about 15 minutes each.

Two of the poets - David McNeish and Tim Tim Cheng - used the theme as inspiration for meditations on climate change, with McNeish’s poem In Deep - about the fear and pain of inevitable profound change in the oceans that shape our world - startlingly enhanced by a clown performance from Ruxy Cantir. At first, the idea seemed painfully awkward. Yet Cantir - in huge sea-coloured trousers - is no mean clown; and by the end, the imagery of a playful species facing a grim extinction was almost unbearably poignant.

Tim Tim Cheng, by contrast, presented her poem I Too Overflow in a slightly more conventional collaboration with electronic violinist, instrumentalist and vocalist Alexandra Shrinivas, delivering part of her meditation on being young, alive and female in a time of disaster from within beautiful a multi-coloured veil that seemed to represent the power and beauty of nature.

And the evening ended in breathlessly entertaining science-fiction-rap style with with The Starlight Narcissist And The Electronic Lake, Raymond Williams’s fast-talking meditation on the male search for the perfect partner in a new space age peopled by artificial intelligence and vague post-earth fragments of human consciousness; all accompanied by tremendous electronic sounds from Ross Somerville dressed as the lake, in the kind of experimental event that brings joy to the hearts of performance art fans everywhere, and will doubtless soon appear again, somewhere on Scotland’s pulsating poetry scene.