Claire Williamson’s Visiting the Minotaur is full of artful reflections, refractions, and re-workings of incidents that reveal a fraught childhood and adolescence, a family riddled with dark secrets and tragedy, and her ensuing quest to escape this legacy and create a happier household for her own family. Sometimes the author borrows from classic mythology. The image of the minotaur, the beast in the labyrinth, recurs and helps the poet come to terms with and exorcise the violence she experienced as a child. The poems are not without considerable humor, delicate ironies, tender observations and just plain fun. ‘Cows’ get their splendid moment in the “lemon light,” and we meet ‘Laika’ the first dog in outer space