Kensington Chelsea Westminster Today 14 Apr 2015

Scarlett was featured in the Kensington Chelsea Westminster Today this month. Read the article below.

Ask 25-year old London-based poet and performer Scarlett Sabet about her influences and she responds with a breathless litany of names: "Baudelaire, Rossetti, Blake, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, the Beats Poets, Sylvia Plath, Keith Douglas, Kate Tempest, Dean Atta..." Not bad company to keep by a new poet on the block, you'll agree.

reminiscent of the young Clare Pollard... a promising successor, a new generation

Every day Sabet starts by writing three pages of streams of consciousness, "just to get into the flow." Some of the longer pieces in her first published collection, Rocking Underground , were written to the rhythm of an underground train while on her daily commute across town, hence its title; others could have been written anywhere.

In January she gave a reading at Shakespeare & Co, the famous bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris, a literary shrine and home to numerous twentieth-century giants, such as Joyce and Hemingway. In May she will be at The Troubadour in Old Brompton Road, where she has been given a ten minute set, quite something for a poet of her age and experience.

Several of her poems are deep and dark, like Weapon of Choice, Shackles and Unnatural Act. As such they are reminiscent of the young Clare Pollard whose first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, received rave reviews when published in 1998, when she was aged just 19. Her poems were described as "poetic postcards from the edge," demonstrating a precocious adolescent's, "penchant for raw confessionalism." Sabet is a promising successor, a new generation.

With her Pre-Raphaelite looks, Sabet could have been depicted in a painting by Rossetti as well imagined reciting his poetry. As it is, she will be performing her own work as part of the "Spring to Summer's readings at The Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, SW5 9JA on Monday 11th May between 8 and 10pm. Tickets £7. A limited edition of her first collection, Rocking Underground , is available, signed and numbered, from her website at £25.