The Upshot

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. Her retrospective, "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".

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.