The new collection by the award-winning poet Amy Crutchfield employs a minimalist technique, using fragmentary and epigrammatic forms as well as mythic retellings and narrative sequences, to explore the grounds for human motivation and the often painful truths at the core of our personalities. Balancing candour with restraint, the poetry examines the tensions that arise between incompatible impulses, in a world that is, in Louis MacNeice’s famous phrase, ‘incorrigibly plural’. These tensions are embodied in the Minotaur, a hybrid figure which is both human and monstrous, and whose original name, Asterion, gives this collection its title. Asterion also pays particular attention to the act of naming, probing the words we choose and the ways we use them, and how these choices shape the world we inhabit. Its focus on emblematic moments and images convey a strong sense of love and longing, an appetite for knowledge and a disposition to wonder.
