February 13th Young Blood: Sandeep Parmar, Helen Mort and James Byrne.

Presented by Emily Dening. With music from Josh Navon.

CB1 Café, Mill Road, 8pm. Entrance is £3 or £2 concessions.

Further details about the poets, with examples of their work, can be found below.

James Byrne

Editor and founder of The Wolf poetry magazine, James Byrne’s debut collection, 'Passages of Time', was published by Waterways in 2003 and a second book is forthcoming. James has recited his poems across the UK and America, most recently at The Green Mill (Chicago) and The Groucho Club (London). He has helped to organise the World Poets' Tour for the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS and is currently editing two anthologies whilst facilitating a European tour to mark five years of The Wolf magazine.

The Child

The pathway becomes a mess of brambles.
I stumble along in the dark as if blindfolded,
my two arms outstretched like a sleepwalker.
The church-bells peal into a long sequence
of echoes that make multiples of midnight.
At uneven distances, a succession of howls
whines through the forest. I catch my breath.
Ahead, the tall spire splits a scurry of cloud.
The church gate is covered with ice. Inside,
miniature graves are stubbled with frost:
lives of children who died in the accidents
that come from love. A wind nudges itself
through the black fingertips of branches.
The air is so cold it crackles inside my lungs.
Under the moon my face is a broken ghost.
I stoop forward to check for names and dates.


Sandeep Parmar

Sandeep Parmar was born in England and raised in California. She received an MA in creative writing from UEA in 2003 and is currently finishing a PhD in literature at UCL on the modernist poet Mina Loy.

June 16, 1956. The Church of St. George the Martyr, London

It will be fifty years soon.
And yet it seems the preparations have not begun,
for there are still thoughts of winter
in the boughs above Queen’s Square.

A drake flies overhead. I think he is lost.
His cry is like a man who is to wed.

And what a day it must have been,
the stones of the old church have not forgotten,
though the preparations for your wedding
do not feel as though they have begun.

And yet too late, and so, too late,
the couple that hurries in through the parish gate
welcomes the spirits in empty pews that are to be
their only guests. So, it is the same as it was then.

But it is not the same and yet it is, time will make
much of this and much of you and yet it cannot be the same.

A man, bustles into the square in a black raincoat
like someone in a scare, frightens the cashmere
gentlemen that back away from him
and his immortal packages. In each arm he carries ten
or more Styrofoam boxes labelled ‘human organ’
and runs and runs, hoping to arrive before the knowledge
of their death blackens the skins of his beating carriage.

The preparations have arrived and gone.
We hustle the dead around and imagine
somehow that they are alive, that time could still ferry you
back and transplant you untarnished in this beginning.

The sky is late, later than it was fifty years ago that day
when you, having married, were carried out hurriedly
in something pink and knitted with one summer rose,
that blossomed in your hand in Bloomsbury on Bloomsday.

Helen Mort

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield and now divides her time between Cambridge, where she studies, and Derbyshire, where she is mainly found running on the fells. She is President of the University Writers' Guild, and a 'Stanza' representative for the Poetry Society in London. Helen is a previous winner of the Foyle National Young Poets competition and her first short collection, 'The Shape of Every Box' will be released in April.


Tinsley Towers

They prop themselves up
against the sky; two shift workers
taking a breather, letting their smoke
uncoil above the terraces.

By clocking-off time,
evening has them suited black;
square-jawed bouncers at the city’s door,
guarding a fringe of dimmed lights, and

nearing home
in a slur of traffic, they greet you –
two fingers raised at the M1, at cars going
nowhere in particular.

You scan the future
in a service station newsagents.
Holes in your skyline, fingers crumpled
in a fist of clean air.