Amy Crutchfield reflects on Asterion (November 2026), her first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with The Cyprian. The book’s title derives from the lesser-known name of the Minotaur, a hybrid figure from Greek mythology both human and monstrous, which roughly translates into ‘the starry one’.

‘And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion.’
Apollodorus: Bibliothecha, III, I

‘The House of Asterion’, Borges’ short story about the Minotaur, begins with this quote from the Greek scholar Apollodorus. At less than two pages, the story’s brevity belies its breadth and its potency. For it, and the myth from which it springs, speak of inclusion and exclusion; brutality and humanity; the pure and the impure; suffering and redemption; love and lust; and life and death. The story also makes a fundamental point about the power of names. A number of similar ideas underlie poems in this collection.

Half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur’s terrible reputation was something I had known about for as long as I could remember, but not his name – Asterion – which is luminous and hopeful. Was this because his birth name had been regularly elided from a tradition busy establishing the Minotaur as a figure universally reviled?

The power of naming is central to Borges’ story. He isn’t alone in centring the act of naming. In his Epilogue, while also praying for ‘the grace of accuracy’, Robert Lowell warns us ‘to give / each figure in the photograph / its living name’. 

The grace of accuracy is a desirable aim in itself, but to strive for such accuracy is also actively to avoid the harms of inaccuracy, which could encompass anything from confusion and misnomer through to injurious silences and deceit. This collection is interested in ‘living name[s]’ and, more generally, the words we choose and the consequences of our choices.

Pairs, poles, opposites, couples, crossings, lovers, hybridity – the book is replete with twos. Oppositions provide an inherent tension, but they also give rise to the fertile ground of paradox, and to the idea of the pharmakon: poison and remedy in one. Is love the ultimate pharmakon? 

The poems stem from a curiosity about human interaction: about how we treat each other, in private and in public; about the the ways we hurt, and sometimes endeavour to heal, each other and ourselves; and about what we glean in the process. 

Borges’ story casts doubt on Asterion’s dangerous reputation. Several poems in this collection also seek to unsettle our image of him. Whatever Asterion’s culpability, he is one who is utterly excluded, and the result, in Borges’ telling, is that when confronted with Theseus’ lethal blade, this fearsome creature, ‘scarcely defended himself’.

Melbourne-based author Amy Crutchfield reflects on The Cyprian, her debut book of poetry, in which she interrogates the nature of love in all its forms. The book was released in September 2023.

That we’ve broken their statues,
that we’ve driven them out of their temples,
doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
— ‘Ionic’ by C. P. Cavafy

To Homer, Aphrodite, goddess of love, is ‘the Cyprian’ and it was probably through Cyprus that Aphrodite first entered Greece. This book bears the goddess’s name, but perhaps it would be safer to dedicate it to her? Passionate and vengeful, if you don’t give the Olympians their due, they take it.

Although I didn’t set out to write a book about love, it is love that connects these poems: romantic, sexual, mythical, familial, historical and human. Love for the living and love for the dead. Although the poems also venture away from the centre; towards love’s borders, lawless places, and across those borders, to situations where love fails us, or we fail love.

Aphrodite has dozens of epithets. They allude to her powers in connection with sex, fertility, sex work, beauty, birth, seafaring and war, among other things. Each epithet reflects an aspect of the goddess or a facet of her aegis, being her sphere of influence. What struck me as I studied Aphrodite’s epithets was their range, and the consequent array of situations in which people must have turned to her.

The book has five parts, each is named after one of these epithets, and the poems within each part can be seen to congregate thematically around the epithet in its title.  

The contemporary influences on this collection are many. They include singers and songwriters as well as poets, and I have no confidence I could accurately list them if I tried. However, as a needleworker uses backstitch, these poems often move back to move forward. A short way back, to, for example, Ernest Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, or Rilke, and further back also, to Sappho, Catullus and Homer.

In the quote above, Cavafy suggests that the gods may not be dead. Others have suggested they are only in exile. In any case, this book is not named for an imaginary figure from myth, or a character consigned to history, but rather the force she represents. A force which persists – fierce, intractable and undiminished.

We feature here a poem from Amy Crutchfield’s debut collection, The Cyprian (September 2023), a book that interrogates the nature of love, in all its forms. The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. ‘A Narrow Field’ is the final poem of the fifth part, which is titled ‘Aphrodite Genetyllis – Protectress of births’.

Open, the coffin shocked me.
I had thought that we were more disposed
to keep things hidden.
Thought – I did not tick this box?
In any case, you looked well

wearing the clothes I’d chosen –
light, comfortable linen, a touch of colour.
As per the regulations
there was no one there.
Still, the choice had vexed me.

You wore your hair as a small cloud
with the promise of showers
and I patted it as a child might
size up a stick of floss.
I saw you as a great painting

recovered from a cave or cellar
with me the expert
able to recognise the original.
Bohr said that an expert
is a man who has made

all the mistakes
in a narrow field.
And probably I have made
mistakes on you.
Inside the coffin, a sable curtain

and two pink buds,
my infant fists,
tangled inside it. Tangled
in that way babies have
of grabbing, and I mean really

yanking, their mother’s hair.
The trick being
to stay calm,
even as a tear pricks.
So the baby knows it is not a game

which would only lead to more yanking.
The trick being to stay calm
as you unsnarl yourself
hair by hair
from their grasp.

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