Holly Pester & Luke Roberts: Cafés
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What is the purpose of tonight’s event and who are the hosts?
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Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit LondonRiew Bookshop.co.uk forward slash events. Good evening everybody and welcome to the London Review Bookshop. Uh where tonight it is a delight to welcome Holly Pester and Luke Roberts. Holly, congratulations and uh welcome back. Holly has done a fair few events for us uh over the years, um, excluding for uh the publication of her novel The Lodgers, uh sung two years ago. Tonight, however, we're here to celebrate uh Holly's secondary poetry collection, Cafes, published by Fitzcaraldo. In conversation with Holly tonight is Luke Roberts, lecturer at King's College London, the co-director of the small press distance or object and author of most recently bad omens.
Luke and Holly, thank you so much for being here and thank you to everyone at FitzCorraldo as ever.
Oh.
It's cafe time. It's
cafe time. Thank you so
much everybody for coming out. This is very exciting, all these people over here too. I'm gonna say a few things to begin with and I'm gonna keep it uh relatively brief because like all of you, I'm really here to listen to Holly Reed. And then Holly will read a little bit and then we'll we'll ask. Do some talking. I guess I want to say that uh for about fifteen years now, Holly Pester has been one of the kind of great heroes of uh poetry and poetics in Britain. And during that time I've had the great privilege really of Seeing her read aloud from work in progress, uh, over a kind of season, you know, seeing Holly read two or three times maybe over a course of six months. And I remember more than once uh kind of distinct feeling that Holly was uh posing.
specific formal questions in her work. А also solving them sometimes. technical things about poetry and how poetry works, about line breaks or about uh uh about speech and things like that. But then also broader questions about poetry's relationship to things like the body or the voice. or the public. And Holly's poems I think seem to kind of chip away at those definite articles with a kind of slapstick brevure and a tragic comic political intuition. And uh anybody who's been to poetry reading will know that it's not always the case that poets pose and solve complicated formal and technical problems in their poetry readings. It's a it's a rare kind of event to think, oh We're really getting somewhere.
And there's a kind of generosity to it as well. Um, that sense, I think, of listening to Holly and feeling as a writer at least, that there were things that you could also do suddenly that you couldn't do before. It's like, oh, that's that's how to do it. So something very special about that. Her work is in the tradition of figures like Tom Rayworth and Denise Riley and the sound poetry of people like Paula Leclair and uh the performance work of figures like Caroline Bergville. But it's also in the tradition I think of something like the work of Victoria Wood or the art of Marquis Smith and uh the fall. And I think that there's something there about especially thinking about the fall or about a kind of twin critique of the two torn halves of both a kind of elite high modernism, uh, and also a kind of mass culture and popular culture, and uh kind of involving yourself in both of those things, again with that kind of sense of a a kind of
Slapstick critique. Um underpinning all of that. I think that there's a very strong feminist commitment in Holly's work. А на ванна менш і а бук. Called Go to Reception and Ask for Sarah in Red Felt Tip Pen. It was published in 2051 by Bookworks. And that book is based on work in the archives of the Women's Art Library at Goldsmiths.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the purpose of tonight’s event and who are the hosts?
0:00–5:14
2
How does Luke Roberts introduce Holly Pester’s new collection *Cafés*?
5:14–8:41
3
What themes and formal questions does Holly explore in *Cafés*?
8:41–30:16
4
How does the book structure its four café‑type sections?
30:16–43:43
5
What literary traditions and influences shape Pester’s work?
43:43–52:53