The Bell Tower, Pamela Crowe
The Emma Press, 2022 £7.00
‘to shout across the landscape’: inhabiting anger
What strikes me about these poems is their willingness to inhabit anger. The title The Bell Tower refers, say the notes, to the poet’s ‘space of my own with a great view from which to shout across the landscape.’ (An echo of Plath’s The Bell Jar is lurking — though instead of entrapment, the bell tower represents empowerment).
Pamela Crowe names her subject in the opening poem, subtitled ‘I (or anger)’. Here, she muses on how her neighbour
probably would not want me
with three kids and an anger problem
This naming invites the anger into the frame, and signals to the reader that the speaker, while angry, is in control. From here, I felt able to enjoy and relate to that rage: from a poem titled ‘Cloudcunt’ to her use of expletives throughout.
Anger is linked with feminine experience. The speaker, who until recently has been ‘tucked away and rooted’ (‘Into the Fields’) by marriage to a man, is beginning to break into her true self. Anger blazes a path: it strips away pretence and clears a space from which to speak (or shout). In ‘Length’ she addresses her ex:
Go and be happy with someone else.
Not me.
Go and do twee things with her.
Among Crowe’s (very un-twee) images are tampons, uneaten cheeses, and toilets, all of which combine to hold two fingers up to the conventional ‘poetic’, and convention in general.
She also touches on the mixed experience of motherhood, perhaps most directly in ‘Co-Minting’. In this poem, which is both exasperated and tender in tone, the speaker tells how mints on a family car journey provide
A brief reprieve from yelling
So, it seems, do the poems. Whilst anger is often fraying at their edges, they are also exercises in self-containment. For instance, in ‘What is it?’, there’s a moment of meaningful meditation as the speaker watches over a dying starfish and observes ‘love’s / vast attempt to live’. In these spaces, tenderness — perhaps the opposite of anger — is allowed to take root.