The Bell Tower: Poems

By Pamela Crowe

Acerbic, precise and very funny, Pamela Crowe's poems explore home life and relationships in a delightfully forthright voice. Secret frustrations and anxieties are aired and private fantasies brought into the light, as odes blur into diatribes and psychodramas become love poems.

Woven throughout The Bell Tower is a love of Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and – above all – Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones. These are fierce, acutely observed poems that give weight to domestic minutiae and put words to helpless howls into the abyss.
You, the cloud.

Oh look! there you are,

blobbing along as if you're best friends with rain

and thunder is your dad. Fuck off.

- excerpt from 'Cloudcunt'

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Release date: May 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915628046

Pamela Crowe

Pamela Crowe is an artist and writer based in Leeds. Her practice focuses on words and how we say them, on text, voice and performance. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2019 Bridport Poetry Prize, longlisted in the 2020 National Poetry Competition, and published in The Poetry Society’s Poetry News. The Bell Tower is her first book.

Book preview

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THE BELL TOWER

POETRY PAMPHLETS

how the first sparks became visible, by Simone Atangana

Bekono, tr. from Dutch by David Colmer

do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom, by Rachael Matthews

With others in your absence, by Zosia Kuczyńska

Sandsnarl, by Jon Stone

This House, by Rehema Njambi

is, thinks Pearl, by Julia Bird

What the House Taught Us, by Anne Bailey

Overlap, by Valerie Bence

The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising, by Jack Houston

Ovarium, by Joanna Ingham

Milk Snake, by Toby Buckley

SHORT STORIES

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna, tr. from Latvian by Jayde Will

Tiny Moons: A year of eating in Shanghai, by Nina Mingya Powles

Postcard Stories 2, by Jan Carson

Hailman, by Leanne Radojkovich

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

My Sneezes Are Perfect, by Rakhshan Rizwan

The Bee Is Not Afraid of Me: A Book of Insect Poems

Cloud Soup, by Kate Wakeling

ART SQUARES

Menagerie, by Cheryl Pearson, illustrated by Amy Evans

One day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum, written and illustrated by Elīna Eihmane

Pilgrim, by Lisabelle Tay, illustrated