The Cyprian

Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry

A powerful debut which interrogates the nature of love in all its various forms.

From poems of desire and sexual longing to poems of love in the face of death, The Cyprian explores the joy and heartbreak love weaves into our lives. The collection confronts some of our primary questions about love: how is it possible to accept the death of the beloved? What role does deception play in love? When does love become a force of exploitation? The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty – a complexity which is also implicit in the ambiguity of the book’s title, ‘the Cyprian’.

Crutchfield trained as a classicist, and her poetry combines conversational idioms with mythic visions of human relationship, ‘longing and its/ fierce metamorphosis’. Elegies, love poems and imagistic snapshots mix with wide open epistolary verse. Her poetry reclaims the linguistic power and range of allusion found in late romantic poets like Christopher Brennan and Francis Webb, bringing them to bear on contemporary female experience.

WINNER: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024

In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian, using Aphrodite to explore women’s loves, needs and losses… While Crutchfield brings a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, 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

Truly, it’s a joy.
Weekend Australian

Good, sad, wise, surprising.
Sydney Morning Herald

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