Asterion

Amy Crutchfield’s first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2024, the finely crafted poems of Asterion combine a classical sensibility with a keen eye for common details and the implications therein.

Award-winning poet Amy Crutchfield employs a minimalist technique in her latest collection, 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 conveys a strong sense of love and longing, an appetite for knowledge and a disposition to wonder.

Praise for Amy Crutchfield:

Amy Crutchfield’s poems are remarkable for their clarity and lucidity, for their complex balancing of authoritative statement and strange unsteadying question, of subtle and surreal observation. They have, at times, a depth of anguish, coupled with a steeliness and wit that recalls Gwen Harwood.
Petra White

In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian… The poems are frank, lively and acerbic, as befits one ‘who says what she means and / means what she says.’ Crutchfield’s lines are almost aphoristic in their concision yet see through to worlds magnitudes larger, and her voice arrives fully-fledged, and entirely in command.
Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards