Poetic Voices: Joan Murray and Ellen Kombiyil

When I think of poets who tell stories, I think of Chaucer, Milton, Dante, Tennyson and Longfellow. Storytelling isn’t something I usually associated with contemporary poetry. Two recent collections by poets Joan Murray and Ellen Kombiyil, however, both utilize storytelling, although they do it in entirely different ways.

Murray has been publishing poetry for the last 25 years, and this year has an expanded volume, Swimming for the Ark: New and Selected Poems. In addition to new poetry, she draws upon poems from four volumes published between 1990 and 2015.

Her poems tell stories. In fact, given the poems included in this new volume, Murray has been a storytelling poet from the beginning.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.