Push The Boat Out Festival 2025, Edinburgh review: 'buzzing'

Push The Boat Out Festival 2025, The Pleasance, Edinburgh ★★★★

Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival has a new home at the Pleasance this year, and the venue was buzzing despite the chilly weather with a packed weekend programme.

Push The Boat Out has grown out of the spoken-word scene and has a mission to spread poetry to new audiences, so the emphasis is on performances, panel events and cross art-form collaborations rather than straight poetry readings.

On Saturday afternoon, I caught a lively event with three strong female voices: Isabelle Baafi, winner of this year’s First Collection Forward Prize, Janette Ayachi and Rosie Garland. All were accomplished performers of their work, and were more than capable of sharing insights about it, and about life in general. Baafi’s opening sestina remains a highlight of the day.

READ MORE: poyums annaw, by Len Pennie review: 'hugely entertaining and intelligent'

If you’re looking for a poet who has taken the art form to new audiences, you need look no further than Scotland’s own Len Pennie, currently climbing the bestseller charts with her second collection, poyums annaw. Pennie is a superb performer and raconteur, with a sincere commitment to talking about the issues she cares about: Scots language, mental health - and poetry itself.

While her strict adherence to rhythm and rhyme, and ready use of Scots, make her unusual in the poetry world, the poems she read, interspersed with interview with festival director Emma Collins, were funny, outspoken and tender.

READ MORE: Book review: Moder Dy (Mother Wave) by Roseanne Watt

Then there was a presentation from the four winners of the 2024 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Poetry Award: London-based Karen McCarthy Woolf (who did her own scratch performance collaboration earlier in the day), clare e potter from Wales, Shetlander Roseanne Watt and the excellent Scott McKendry from Northern Ireland.

While the advertised poetry-music collaboration, The Clearing, turned out to be a small part of the event, it was a pleasure to hear four distinctive poetic voices.

Push The Boat Out has an experimental, collaborative ethos which pushes into new areas, though there also seems to be a commitment not to leave traditional on-the-page poets behind. Not every experiment will work, but the potential is here to develop a greater audience, not just for the festival itself but for poetry in general.

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