Upshot

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. Her latest book, "The Upshot", includes a new collection, "The Divided", which constructs a modern metaphysic out of love and the daily, set against the latent (sometimes tragic) divisions in contemporary society. The selection from three critically acclaimed earlier collections ranges from the lyrical exuberance of "Sunset Grill" to the vivid nocturnal surrealism of "The School of Night".