PUBLISHED poets are lined up to host a poetry reading at Quarr Abbey.

James Arthur, the distinguished North American poet, is taking time out from his busy schedule while in England as a visiting fellow at Exeter College at Oxford University.

He will be joined by three former interns of the Abbey — Blake Everitt, James Coghill and Sam Davidson, who have all recently had books of poetry published.

James Arthur is Canadian-American and lives in Baltimore, where he teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

He is the author of Charms Against Lightning, Hundred Acre Wood and the forthcoming The Suicide's Son. His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books.

He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize and a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland.

Blake Everitt lives in Ventnor and teaches English at Southampton University. His research speciality is the works of Samuel Beckett. He is the author of the poetry collections Breathshapes and Lightgnawn and the play collections Goya's Ghost, Roads of Hunger and Forgotten Grounds.

James Coghill is the author of Anteater and has also had poems published in Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman and Tentacular, and in several of the Headbook anthologies. Among his preoccupations are ecology, Christian desert spirituality, and early modern literature.

Sam Davidson is the author of Love’s Many Names and several other published poems. He is based in Hythe, but has lived and worked among Kurdish refugees and war veterans in camps on their way to the UK and other destinations — an experience reflected in his poetry.

The poetry reading is at 5.40pm on Saturday, February 23, in the Archway meeting room.