Visiting the Minotaur

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Review by Carla Scarano D'Antonio, WriteOutLoud

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Processing bereavement and progressing along the difficult path of recovering trauma are the excruciating steps that delineate Clare Williamson’s poetry. Her mother and brother committed suicide and she was abused verbally and physically when she was a child. These experiences are revisited and explored in her poems, which connect with ancient myths, mediated by pictures, dreams and lyrical visions. Her progress is slippery and she sometimes goes back or pauses, but the dynamic movement engendered by the poems reveals a relentless effort to survive at all costs. She is a survivor who narrowly escaped the destructive and self-destructive reality of her family and progressed towards a more mature understanding.

The process is embedded in the mythical figure of the Minotaur mediated by Picasso’s artwork. Notoriously, Picasso’s series of etchings, drawings and paintings of the Minotaur are loaded with erotic allusions. The human-beast creature represents the bestial side of humanity, the unrestrained desires that cannot be tamed but are also part of being human. In Picasso’s work this is represented as a sexual vitality that combines the human and the bestial in the shape of the Minotaur himself, a human body with the head and the tail of a bull.

According to the myth, the Minotaur is eventually killed by Theseus, who is helped by Ariadne. She gives him a thread which he unravels to escape from the labyrinth once he has killed the beast. The myth has multiple, complex meanings; it not only refers to the bestial side of humanity that is defeated by the Greek hero, but also refers to the labyrinth as a symbol of the human journey, a confusing maze with a monster at the centre. Killing the Minotaur equates to killing the bestial side of humanity, which is also its most vital side. At the same time, to get out of the bewildering labyrinth some sort of trick or help is needed, which is exactly what Ariadne supplies to aid Theseus. While looking at Picasso’s picture, the poet eventually acknowledges that she is the Minotaur, but she also identifies with all the other figures present in the picture:

I’m here because I am the Minotaur,
the veil, the hand, the island,
the woman, the horse, the hooves,
the cave, the fist, and the death.

(‘Visiting the Minotaur’)

The poet’s experience encompasses all the aspects of the myth, from which she draws the strength to survive. The Minotaur is a multi-faceted, recurring image, apparently tamed in the first poem of the collection, when he dances with girls. But he is also misunderstood when he speaks in the first person. He remarks that he does not eat his victims, the 14 Athenian girls and boys offered to him according to the legend. But “They eat each other in the end,/caught in hunger’s fists,/not knowing they aren’t me” (‘The Minotaur speaks’). The myth clearly connects with sacrifice, where the ‘monster’ is doomed, as in ‘Tauromachia’:

He yields.
Like me, he never wanted
this dance of life and death.

We drown
in the crowd’s collective moan,
thumbs down.

Our trembling knees,
bloodshot eyes,
meet in the sherry dirt.

There seems to be no way out for the bull, and maybe not for the poet either. However, she rises again after each fall, “clinging to a balustrade,/panting, as if on a precipice”. The progress is long and slow, as described in a masterly way in ‘The Spiral Staircase’:

I find myself thinking
about reaching the top,
attempting to climb a stair at a time.

Wise enough these days
to realise there is no
skipping a step. Each tread polished,

slippery, progress is tricky.
My hands clamp the bannister,
hoist this uncertain body.

The grief of bereavement lingers through the collection, together with a constant effort to overcome it and defy death. The traumatic experiences the poet lived through within her original family are counterbalanced by the new family she creates with her two daughters.

She wonders “what it was/that stopped me from spinning out of control” (‘Brizzle’), what saved her from running away from home, from the dramatic events happening in her family, after she slept rough one night:

We almost rang the police. Almost.
The officer might have asked
why she’d rather spend the night
alone, sleeping rough,
than be in bed at home.

(‘Rough’)

The broken lines highlight the uncertainty and suffering of her situation. It is an inner agony that can only be compensated for by creative alternatives, that is, by giving birth and producing poetry, voicing her grief. Her daughters and her poetry are therefore the source of her rebirth. Giving birth can be painful but is repaid by the baby’s presence, which reassures her:

You come covered in thick sebum,
waterproof, an astronaut,
confident of inner-space, outer-space
this planet
and the next.

(‘Vernix Caseosa’)

Bringing up and living with her daughters gives the poet new vitality, the reason to live and carry on, and she rediscovers the vibrancy of everyday life:

Under the troposphere of spruces
blueberries are mounting
patiently in the pail –
small hands turn maroon,
work with the rhythm of ants
on pine needles hills.

(‘My Daughters Blueberrying’)

We haven’t played Mummy Island
for a while, but this morning you
sit on my legs in the bath, while
I wash your hair. I hold a flannel
to your eyes to stop the soap-sting,

tumble your towel for a minute
in the dryer, making it cosy,
fold your hair in a super
absorbent wrap.

(‘Split Ends’)

The lines evolve smoothly in these poems, conveying a calmer mood in the pauses of the punctuation; they describe an ordinary scene with reassuring details. Within the collection a pantoum, ekphrastic poems and shape poems enrich and expand the themes and forms, giving a comprehensive quality to Williamson’s poetry.

The collection actualises progress in the poet’s life; she moves away from the traumatic experiences she underwent in her original family towards a creative new life that encompasses poetry and her new family. The poems reveal connections with myths and art that are reinterpreted in the poet’s personal and profoundly human vision expressed in compelling lines. The past cannot be changed but can be revisited with an increasing self-awareness and attempts at reconciliation.

Review by David C. Ward, PN Review

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Is everything war time these days? From actual war (Syria, Afghanistan) to virtual war (video games, American football) to the culture ‘wars’ and politics, everything seems weaponised. We’re always cocked and locked. When Claire Williamson, in her excellent Visiting the Minotaur, describes giving birth as a battle ‘like the Somme’ you get the rhetorical point (it’s ‘no man’s land’) while wincing at the conflation, the imprecision. the comparison is just too easy, too rote; it makes birth and battle meaningless. Warfare metaphors work better when they’re hidden or displaces. Fortunately, this blunt excess marks the limit of what Williamson pushes up against – up to but not through – in poems that treat life as a series of tripwires; that thread doesn’t lead you through the labyrinth but is attached to a Claymore mine. The Minotaur is coming for you:

plunging through three-and-a-half thousand years:

an earthquake, eruption, tsunami,

the rising myth of Atlantis,

so that I’m swimming next to bovine hide,

pulled through the labyrinth’s two thousand rooms

Masked by myths and history, Williamson’s poems teeter on the ledge caused by loss and wounding. Reports of a wold in the Czech Republic (‘while packs roam the Polish boarder / licking their lips’): ‘Characters known to my children / only in storybooks from libraries / pop up, land in their laps.’ Threats can come from anywhere – death from above arrives in a poem about ‘Guernica’, town and painting – but mostly from within ourselves. The suicide support group finds a cheerful bond in their shared scarring: ‘It’s a fashion we never through we’d wear, / but we wear it all the same.’ There’s a very touching poem, ‘Bill’, about an old man discovered at home after a fall (‘naked on the carpet, / staring wide-eyed at the ceiling’):

This is not just a fall.

You’ve been searching

for some other time

all evening long.

Another casualty, tripped up in the labyrinth.

Williamson’s poem ‘Extremities’ begins ‘The explorer on Radio Four describes how men / climb mountains because they can’t give birth // and be mothers…’ and goes on to speak about how she wants to rescue men caught in blizzards, losing toes and protect her children growing older. Unlike the earlier reference to the Somme, the rather polemical beginning works here because it raises the question of toxic masculinity and the need for men to fight. Benjamin Hertwig, whose first book is Slow War, was a Canadian soldier who fought in Afghanistan. The stakes are laid down in the first poem ‘Genesis’: ‘behind the elementary school / and the great wooden structure / that looks like Noah’s ark / I watch you kick the dare-hair boy.’ No peaceable kingdom here in this ark. The ritualised violence of hunting leads to enlistment and the disorienting violence of warfare:

exactly what you expect

cause war fucks with geography

reconfigures

the contour

line

of your

mind.

It’s not stated in the author’s note but it’s clear that the genesis of these poems is to tally the effects of war time – of masculinity – on everything that war touches. Hertwig favours a lean, stripped down or telegraphic language that we are accustomed to describe as the modern (male) response to emotional wounding. The clipped language mimics the gasping speech of the injured man, holding the pain in. How we let the pain out is another question. One hopes for more books, more poems, as carefully considered as these two. In a weaponised culture where rage is a default option and the Twitter flame war passes as debate on gets marked and ridiculed as a weakling for calling for the values of culture and the arts. But if we are going to honestly mark the impact of war and violence on ourselves and our society, it can only be done through art and literature. I guess the key word there is ‘honestly’. One of the functions of war analogies, the ease with which we resort to them and the ease with which this cast of mind flattens distinctions, is precisely to eradicate the honesty that the present moment requires.

Review in Artemis Poetry

Friday, July 5, 2019

Claire Williamson’s third collection, Visiting the Minotaur, is impressive for reasons which include honest narrative about challenging life experiences: the death of both her birth mother and brother by suicide, an adoptive family who made her feel unloved and the break up with a partner. A perceptive front cover comment describes these poems as ‘beguiling…self-assured yet emotionally raw’ (Michael Faber). In company with poets like Pascale Petit, Williamson uses extended reference to ancient myth (and myths of her own making as in ‘My Bother and Mother as Horses’) to help plumb emotional damage. Readers may sense that there is a sense of excitements, exorcism, and, also, the fulfilment of ambitious artistic purpose in this, mainly tightly-controlled, quest for herself. The opening poem, ‘Swimming with the Bull’, refers to the archaic, daring sport of bull-leaping – “the man in haematite / somersaulting the back of the beast. // The athlete’s body mirrors the whip / of the tail, an inverse curve”. Williamson clearly enjoys the exotic and erotic content of myth, but she is versatile, also offering dead-pan realism about events in her childhood: “she backhanded me in the hearse-like Volvo / because I brought the wrong dog-food” (‘Heterotopia’); “On my fifteen-year-old chest, / the scent of swelling dough settles my breath // a comfort not felt at home” (‘Bakery, 1986’). In these more direct poems, she is also an image-maker, the language working hard for strong effects. And there is more than doom and gloom here, including records of resilience, supportive relationships, the good things in life: “they smudge lips with temptation, lure pocket-sized fingers / closer to earth”, ‘My Daughters Blueberrying’. This poet’s energy and search for varied approaches can lead to occasional overkill or blurring of intention but this book is both a compelling record and a sharing, through language, of an irrepressible vitality.

Review by Angela Topping, Stride Magazine

Monday, February 4, 2019

Williamson is unafraid to dive into the darkness and confront her worst fears and tragedies. In ‘My Brother and Mother as Horses’, she explores the notion of haunting by having her mother and brother return in animal form, her brother still wearing ‘the blue noose’ he died in, her mother affectionate, warm, comforting her, by nuzzling her chest, replacing the warmth lost since the mother died when the child was only three months old. The poem is one of those consoling bereavement dreams one has after losing loved ones. One of the motifs in the collection is the imagining of her relationship with her missing mother.

Williamson is adroit at finding a myth to tell her truths. In ‘The Walk’, she uses the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (told by Browning in his famous narrative poem), remembering an incident on a walk where she was separated from her children, when they were guided through a narrow pass and she had to go the long way round to reach them. This in turn leads her to mediate on the Aberfan disaster, when children at school were lost in a mud avalanche that crushed their school. The line ‘quick as a flick of a rodent’s tale’ is a good example of Williamson’s skill with the music of consonance and assonance.

‘The Minotaur Speaks’ is a text transformation in which the monster is, like all cattle, vegetarian. He does not eat the tributes: they hunt each other in their hunger. He knows the way out, but has been kept inside the labyrinth by shame only. The poem is similar to Brugel’s painting ‘The Fall of Icarus’, in that the falling boy only appears in the final stanza, whereas in the painting, only the boy’s leg appears as he vanishes into the sea, dwarfed by everything else in the picture. The reader has sympathy for the bull’s loneliness in this poem. The Minotaur appears as a motif in lots of poems in this collection, and the cover painting, of a girl with a shopping bag, and a bull in a suit, on the London tube, also plays with that idea (Alexandra & the Minotaur by Matthew Grabelsky). ‘Swimming with the Bull’, ‘Stepmother Minotaur’ and the title poem, ‘Visiting the Minotaur’ are all variations on this motif, but in the title poem the speaker herself identifies as the monster.

There are other topics to add to the mix. Strong poems about motherhood and parenthood, significant objects like the ‘Matryoshka’, which is pinned down with devastating accuracy and becomes a symbol of a selfish woman: ‘She only had room for herself’. ‘Heterotopias’ explores a fractured relationship with a stepmother, the speaker making herself not present for the difficult moments, like being told ‘I was not her child’ or being slapped, claiming the incident by refusing to acknowledge it. The poem’s last stanza is disturbing, in that the reader is unsure whether the violence happened or not:

            When I left the carving knife on the table
            with the back door unlocked and she slit a mouth
            in my cream jumper, cut my skin,
            I was already topless, the discarded garment
            staring up at me with its caked red lipstick
            which I’d never be allowed.

The shift into uncertainty unsettles the reader, and the visual shock of the slashed cream jumper and red lipstick is symbolic of skin and blood. Williamson plays with the notion of truth versus facts in other poems too, such as ‘I Never Did Join the Circus, Did I? Overall this is a powerful collection, both disquieting and tender, entertaining and frightening.

Review by Catherine Kelly, The Cardiff Review

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

AN EARLY PIECE IN Claire Williamson’s collection, Visiting the Minotaur, suggests a poet on the defensive: "On Not Being Able to Write About A Dog Without Sounding Sentimental".

The accusation of sentimentality might sting, but it does not seem to have prevented writers—largely, though not always, women—from finding worthwhile subjects in their pets. In a long tradition of literary dogs, we find Virginia Woolf channelling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel in her pseudo-biography Flush, Eileen Myles’ memoir of her pitbull, Afterglow and Emily Dickinson, who once sent a friend a lock of fur from her Newfoundland, Carlo, claiming it was her own. Maybe these writers, already deemed too feminine or too confessional, felt they may as well dig deeper into the emotional landscapes of domestic interdependence. Beneath an apparently "sentimental" bond, they find the complexities of the strange and intimate act of caring for an animal. As Myles put it in Afterglow, a dog is "like an eternally silent child. Who you trust. Who shouldn’t trust you."

Its "sentimental" force became more clear to me in the collection’s second poem about a dog. “Laika” recounts the story of the first dog in space, the Moscow mongrel who "became a name on the world’s lips". Laika has had a long afterlife as a "rising star"—a symbol of utopian progress—but her body had a different fate. Her heart, Williamson writes, was "hard-wired to the spaceship"; she survived a few hours in space—two, maybe three—before she died, overheated and panicking. Her death casts a shadow over the pet dozing sweetly in the earlier poem. From the outset of Visiting the Minotaur, there is tenderness but there is also grief, the anticipation of loss.

Although she only appears in one poem, Laika reverberates throughout the collection. She’s the Icarus in the collection’s extended retelling of the myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur. Through her, we are pulled in two directions, towards the animal body, and towards the mythic. Williamson’s poems are rhythmically and formally straightforward, often in the first person and the present tense. Their lightness allows her to navigate this balance.

In Visiting the Minotaur, the body is always the body under pressure. There is the emotional pressure of grief; the death of a mother, a brother, and other losses in between. In "Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide", Williamson recounts a desire for a return to normality after a violent death, a wish to take part in the "banality / of clothes, shoes, what so-and-so said / to whom" instead of the "confidential histories … about pills, hangings, drownings, / fault, guilt and blame."

And there are the pressures of motherhood. The physical pressure of breast-feeding and of childbirth, the "spine bent … as if in labour", compared in "Extremities" to the mountain-climber’s ascent of Everest, one of many moments in the collection when the vocabulary of the body seeps into natural and urban landscapes. In the fourth section of a poem called "Temple Church, Temple Street, Bristol," Williamson writes, "My tower tilts like the mast / of a sinking ship on a grassy sea. / My body is a whale’s carcass". The medieval buildings also have a touch of that Icarian balance between vulnerability and resolve; standing firmly after hundreds of years, they lean into decay.

Along with Laika, many other animals populate Williamson’s collection—birds, rats, cows, deer—but the book’s central animal is the Minotaur itself, the monstrous hybrid that threads the poems together. The collection begins with "Swimming with the Bull", in which "the animal is bookended by two women … body curving like a dolphin", and ends with the poet’s declaration that "I’m here because I am the Minotaur". The lurking horror of the monster in its labyrinth, and the expressive voice of the poet are combined into one, into the relatively stable lyric "I" that carries the reader from the beginning of the book to its end.

Although Williamson speaks as the minotaur, Daedalus, as architect and as parent, is a significant presence in the collection. The death of Icarus is partly caused by his father’s zeal for invention; a frightening figure for a poet weaving her children into her lines. More so than with any other subject, the themes of motherhood are threaded equally with fear. In "Bathurst Pool", she watches her daughter vanishing into the water, the "seconds stretching / into our drowned future". In "Split Ends", she relinquishes her children to their father for "four days", measuring the banal, tragic distance between them—"seventy-five minutes apart… eighty-miles-per-hour-cars". At times, the desire to mother and be mothered come together painfully, as when she writes, in the acutely poignant "Unimagined Mother II", "I long for you privately / to buy me a surprise red winter coat / with roses round the hood, / to love my daughters, have them on your mind."

As well as Greek myth, Williamson alludes to fairy tales and the semi-mythic figures of a sprawling European canon—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Eliot, Vélazquez, Picasso. Williamson’s allusive palette is a familiar one, but it doesn’t make for overly-familiar poetry. As the poet Jack Spicer once wrote, "prose invents—poetry discloses." In Visiting the Minotaur Williamson discloses the fragile, interconnected worlds of mythology and childbirth, griefs personal and historical. In this space, Williamson sketches an image of a mother and daughters framed, as she describes Vélazquez in his famous "Las Meninas", "at vanishing point."

Review by Zoë Brigley, Planet

Friday, November 16, 2018

...

Family loss is also significant in Claire Williamson’s Visiting the Minotaur, where the underlying theme is the suicide of a mother and brother. The Minotaur figures in Greek myth as a terrifying foe, elusive in the labyrinth but deadly and voracious in his consumption of humans. The symbolism has great relevance for thinking about suicide as something frightening and destructive, linked to an underworld of human feeling. The collection opens with the gut-wrenching ‘My Brother and Mother as Horses’. The poems continue to resurrect the mother and brother, invoking other stories of loss, as in ‘Guernica’, based on Picasso’s painting and dedicated to the people of Aleppo. ‘The Minotaur Speaks’ references Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the mythical plunge overlapping with images of the brother’s suicide in other poems.
The collection also makes good use of counterpoints, so that poems about loss and grief sit alongside poems about the intensity and fragility of birth and parenting. This tension makes the sequence ‘Unimagined Mothers’ (in conversation with Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons) all the more poignant: the narrator is working out how to parent her own children without her mother or brother to help her. She must quest through the maze to make sense of the deaths and her grief. What she finds, at last, is the darkness that exists within us all. So in the final poem, ‘Visiting the Minotaur’, she views Picasso’s Minotaur with Dead Mare in Front of a Cave and finds:

I’m here because I am the Minotaur,
the veil, the hand, the island,
the woman, the horse, the hooves,
the cave, the first, and the death.

Review by Rachel Carney, Created to Read

Thursday, July 12, 2018

This review was first published online by the Created to Read blog and can be read here.

Visiting the Minotaur plunges you straight into the myth in ‘Swimming with the Bull’, a dramatic encounter across ‘three-and-a-half-thousand years’. This sets the tone for the collection as a whole, exploring the surreal nature of family relationships and crossing the boundaries of time and space, as humans and monsters find their roles reversed. The cover image (a painting by Matthew Grabelsky) is both startling and ordinary – the perfect depiction of what lies between the covers.

At its core lies a story of real life trauma, the process of recovery and the search for identity through a veil of confusion and contradictions. The most disturbing of these poems deals head-on with the suicide of a mother and brother, entitled ‘My Brother and Mother as Horses’. It conjures up an imagined tea party scene, where the two of them return and converse:

My brother still wears the blue noose,
now loosened like a hippy necklace,
drawing attention to the deep-ridged cuts
under his chin, like a tree trunk sawn
by an amateur. I try not to stare.

Williamson’s style is lyrical and straightforward, which adds a certain poignancy to imagery such as this, and there is a strong sense of time being stretched or distorted in many of the poems. In ‘Bathurst Pool’, for example, we observe the slow-motion realisation that a child needs saving from drowning, and other poems step outside of time altogether. In ‘Heterotopias’, it seems as if the poet is recreating an alternate reality in which painful moments from her childhood are relived through the eyes of a more capable, or more rebellious version of herself:

When I sat, aged twelve,
on the brown and orange sofa
where she told me I was not her child,
I was also outside in our garden
with the neighbour’s forbidden black cat
stroking his back all the way
to the tip of the tail.

This sense of distortion surrounds another central theme within the collection, that of searching for identity. We see the memory of a past self who goes unrecognised in ‘Bakery, 1986’, the blurring of identities in ‘Stepmother Minotaur’, and the switching of identity in ‘The Minotaur Speaks’, as the young Minoans forget that they are humans, not monsters:

They eat each other in the end,
caught in hunger’s fists,
not knowing they aren’t me.

This culminates in the title poem ‘Visiting the Minotaur’ which appears at the end of the book, describing a visit to see Picasso’s famous painting. The poet seeks to connect with the painting, the myth and the monster:

I’m here because I am the minotaur,
the veil, the hand, the island,

There is also a sense, in many of these poems, of searching for healing through the telling of stories and through images, as the poet makes new connections with the world around her, and has children of her own. In ‘Unimagined Mother II’ we see the powerful realisation that, no matter what happens,

mothers,
even absent mothers,

are forever mothers,
however distant, however dead.

And this is echoed in other poems such as the ‘The Walk’, which recounts the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, comparing the fears of parents separated from their children:

I think of that ripping yarn –
a limping lone survivor-witness,
vermin and betrayal –
told and retold,
which won’t be written down
for a hundred years,
explaining how it can possibly be,
that as quick as the flick of a rodent’s tail,
we can lose our children.

In other poems, such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘Blame’, Williamson creates a dream-like feeling of distance from reality, as the words slide across the page, whilst other poems deal honestly with the surreal aspects of childbirth, breastfeeding and being separated from your children in later life.

Visiting the Minotaur weaves past and present, myth and reality into a tapestry of dream-like encounters, where the taboo subjects of abuse, suicide and grief become stories that make up just part of a wider search for identity, alongside an awareness that all of our stories fit together, and that it is through stories that we find out who we are. The Minotaur is a tragic figure, stuck in his labyrinth, awaiting rescue, but Williamson has given him a new lease of life, drawing him out and finding in him an awareness of what it means to be human, and what it means to be hurting.

Review by Judy Darley, SkyLightRain

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Drawing on myths to make sense of our mortality, Claire Williamson’s first collection with Seren is at once heartbreaking and comfortingly human, with the skill to make your spirits soar.

Seen through Williamson’s eyes, a half bull, half man hybrid is nothing compared to the complexities of surviving your average childhood. From the aching tenderness with which she knits memories about her own daughters to the grief and confusion of losing a sibling and mother, Williamson immerses you with such conviction that you can’t help but empathise.

There’s a distinct irreality to much of the carefully conjured imagery, which only serves to heighten the stark honesty of the sensations being shared. Family members long gone return as horses: “She thrusts her black muzzle/ into the cleft of my torso and arm/ and I feel her warmth for the first time/ since she drank that poison.”

Bereavement is a theme throughout, but even in the bleakest contemplations, Williamson manages to find humour in the moments she captures.

In the powerful Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide, support group conversations become gaudy crochet garments hooked “by a well-meaning aunt,/ separating us from the cool set.” It’s the unexpectedness of the analogy that works so well – speaking depths about the layers of difference unwittingly foisted upon us by others.

Motherhood weaves a brighter but equally searing thread through the collection.In No Man’s Land, a hospital bed becomes the Somme, and the poet, losing blood through childbirth, spells out a name “to keep my senses.” It’s one of the most brilliant and believable descriptions of labour I’ve read.

Williamson envelops us in her inherent protectiveness for her children, as a July day at a lido results in her jumping in, fully clothed: “My dress billows/ on the surface,/ then clings, as your in-breath/ pulls us gaze to gaze.”

And an encounter with a peacock trailing its “teal ballgown”, leads Williamson and her daughters into the pleasures of a debate over why “bird-boys” are so much more flamboyant than “boy-boys”.

The possibility of true happiness glimmers in the stanzas too, summoning visions of Williamson’s younger self wearing expressions as “hopeful as buttered crumpets”

But it’s the presence of the minotaur that will stay with me – misunderstood, lonely and awkward, yet, in Williamson’s hands, imbued with an uncanny grace.

Williamson’s writing is wise, wry, and, above all, illuminating, inviting us to experience the world with the same intensity as she clearly does, and to celebrate that scale of emotional intelligence as a vital means of survival. Quite simply, this collection will remind you how to feel.

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