Holly Pester, Bark Leather, Veer, £5

Holly Pester’s poetry is somewhere in the tradition of Edward Lear, Gertrude Stein, Harold Pinter, Monty Pynthon and Holly Pester.  If you’ve seen Holly Pester leather her poems you can hear her bark in lots of Holly Pester.

This book, from Veer, by Holly Pester, Bark Leather, has a cover image of, what else, but a leather-tree, barking out the word, or sound, ‘leather’ with an all scrunched up face. Bark and leather are of course almost the same things. Read any online dictionary and you will see that both come from the trees since you can peel them both off. And of course cow is as dog is: three letters long, ‘o’ in position 2 and ‘c’ comes before ‘d’. Keep thinking.

The opening poem, Digg Beff, is enough for the purposes of this review to demonstrate how good this collection had on me. If you are ready to join in then bark out loudly and quickly ‒ ‘Dig Beff, Dug Bet, Duck Break, dark bed, dit belly, drag bull. Point and flak.’

WOOF WOOF, WOOF OOWF, OOWF OOWF, FOW FOW, WOF WOF, OOF OOF. Point and flak.

‒ until they sort of deteriorate and sort of come back up into sight again.

If you look up these string of words quoted from Digg Beff on Wikipedia or even Yahoo Answers you will find that they form an etymological chain spanning the Vikings (Dig Beff) to The Superbowl (drag bull). If you enter them into search engines such as Youtube, where glitching is strictly forbidden, it berates you when it says: ‘An error has occurred, please try again later.’ This makes you feel some bit good ‘cause the world again has fissures.

Bark Leather contains super 8 poems which will made you laugh and will made you cry. The poems are perfect for writing aloud with your friend and include tongue twisters, homophonic plumbing and oven seal shanties.

Talk proper Holly. Twice nightly. Barking.

Jade Massive