Scarlett featured in GQ Magazine 11 Oct 2016
Hotfoot from her performance at Lit Up Inside, the one-night celebration in Belfast of the lyrics of Van Morrison - where she lined up with fellow Van fans novelist Ian Rankin, actress Sex and The City actress Kim Cattrall and Pulitzer Prize-winning wordsmith Paul Muldoon - new poetry sensation Scarlett Sabet has granted GQ this video exclusive (Feathers).
Filmed at London’s Leighton House, where the splendour of the baroque interiors matches Sabet’s pre-Raphaelite beauty, the 27-year-old reads the heartfelt Feathers from her new, self-published collection The Lock And The Key.
Inspired by the Beats and Patti Smith, Sabet’s sparse, acutely constructed verses - performed to packed rooms at poetry slams and readings from Earl’s Court venue The Troubadour to historic Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co - broods on such contemporary themes as isolation and despair and the darker emotional aspects of love and sex."Scarlett Sabet is making poetry interesting again" Van Morrison, October 2016
That’s not to say Sabet’s work is inaccessible; "Rocking Underground", the title poem from her first collection, imagines the wild inner workings of the minds of the tube travellers she observes to and from work.
Live, Sabet infuses her performances with “a rhythmic insistence and a reading style that captivates audiences”, says Anne–Marie Fyfe, who has organised poetry nights at the Troubadour for 18 years. “Scarlett’s poems are urban and on-the-edge, with huge vitality and openness.”
Brought up in Surrey of Iranian extraction, Sabet studied acting and performance, appearing in low-budget films as well as episodes of Peep Show and Skins before finding her métier.
“Sure I had my Spice Girls phase like other girls but via my parents I also knew all about Van, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and PJ Harvey, all of those people working in a strong lyrical tradition,” says Sabet, whose ambitions include reading her poetry at San Francisco’s City Lights Books amid the ghosts of her heroes Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac.
Copies of Rocking Underground and The Lock And The Key are available now