Upshot

Anne Rouse was born in Washington DC and grew up in Virginia. After reading History at the University of London, she worked as a nurse and the director of a mental health charity. Since becoming a freelance writer, she has had many residencies, including visiting fellowships in Glasgow and in autumn 2004 in Belfast. She lives in Hastings. Anne Rouse has published four books with Bloodaxe, the collections Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing (1997) – both Poetry Book Society Recommendations – and The School of Night (2004); and The Upshot: New & Selected Poems (2008), which includes a new collection, The Divided (2008), plus a selection from her first three collections. She reads a half-hour selection of poems on Poetry Quartets 9 (British Council/Bloodaxe Books, 2004). A new collection, Ox-Eye, is due from Bloodaxe in 2022.

Anne Rouse’s poems are watchful and amused, sardonic and appalled. They are also in the best sense political: the big picture of our whole society informs her miniatures of city life where dossers and shopping jostle for attention alongside love and death.