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'