In both “Polaroid”, published in the TLS in 2013, and “Finish Line”, which appeared in the paper three years later, Rouse interrogates a photograph for what it can reveal about casual inequalities of gender and class that often hide in plain sight.”
Andrew McCulloch, TLS Online, 24 July, 2018
Anne Rouse is a poet of real lyric gifts… These poems are charged, satisfying and exquisitely crafted. “
Ian Pople, The Manchester Review, October 2008, on The Upshot: New and Selected Poems
… the promising Rouse distils the newly flexible female lyric…”
Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (2005) Cambridge University Press p.194
Rouse is a poet of great formal deftness, with a fine gift for social satire and portraiture, and a comic’s timing. Her formalism can sometimes disguise an experimental streak, however, and her poems are far more intricate constructions than their forms sometimes declare. These are socially and politically engaged poems of great wit and speed, informed by a keen literary intelligence and a talent for an almost forensically close observation of the species. “
Don Paterson and Charles Simic, New British Poetry (2004)
One of 2004’s finest collections.”
Andrew Neilson, Magma 21
To move so quickly and with such assurance…from the trivial to the grand, and to place each so carefully in relation to the other, requires poetic skill. There are plenty of such moments in The School of Night.
John Sears, PopMatters https://www.popmatters.com/tag/anne-rouse
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. The poems’ frequent air of informality allows them to take a while to disclose both her acute exploration of form and timing and the lyricism which offsets her sense of satirist’s duty. Her approach is a great deal harder to bring off than some other work in a superficially similar vein might suggest. Rouse’s work grows in the telling, the reading and the hearing.“
Ruth Padel, Poetry Book Society Bulletin on Timing
Her poems have already received considerable enthusiastic praise for their clarity of vision and her distinctive irony. Even winners are losers as her brilliant, ‘The Pools’ shows and progress is all too bitter in her ferocious ‘M3’. Bright sixth-formers will value much of this collection [Sunset Grill] as a voice speaking about several of their concerns as they prepare for the wider world.”
Mike Hayhoe, The School Librarian
A very engaging poet… impressively resonant.”
Deryn Rees-Jones, London Magazin
A sure touch with the rackety underworld, a spare precision and a lyrical elegance…there is no doubt about the quiet strength of her voice.”
Linda France, Poetry Review
Rouse’s sparky and unillusioned view of the opposition is part of a larger, quietly ambitious endeavour [Timing] to see contemporary city life in its entirety….[Rouse] writes, mostly about London, with such convinced skewing of the expected angles, and with such precise anger and sympathy, that one is inclined to believe her as well as to admire the poems.”
Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times