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
Rouse’s flexibility and variety of form and subject always keeps the reader on their toes. In summary, a little gem.
Ian Gouge, iangouge.com, July 15, 2022
Her grip on the language of storytelling through poems is secure and satisfying.
J. Smith, Graph Review @poetryparc, Dec 18, 2022
Ox-Eye, btw, is on the list of books to be re-read before some of the books yet to be read.
Tim Blackwell, @lampfrey on X, Dec 22, 2022
Some fourteen years after The Upshot, Rouse published Ox-Eye. The back cover blurb describes the poems as having the ‘perspective in Ox-Eye – the term for a small cloud presaging a storm – is one of apprehension in poems relating to personal and social change. … casting a critical eye on what we wish for; and what may happen instead.’ Well, up to a point. The poems in Ox-Eye might be divided roughly into those where the result is quite fully imagined and those where it feels as though the poem is quite received. Of course, Rouse uses her imagination in all of the work. But there are poems here where description is based on observation and those where the description feels more based upon the workings of the mind.
The former type of poem might be exemplified with ‘Inconsequence,’ which I will quote in full.
Drowsing on the steel fire steps
that end in ferns and wallflowers,
you hear a rasping. In come the bag men.
The evening, a cinder, drops into their bag.
Workaday words are said.
The clouds are water vapour.
A flash of wings means prey.
A sail, lit up for a time, is heading in,
under tremendous shadows.
It will disappear. But I’ve seen.
As we’ve seen above, Rouse, herself, was, even in the early stages of her career, very aware of the uses and abuses of condensing matters in her poetry. And what ‘matters’ might mean here is a moot point. In ‘Inconsequence,’ we can see that the majority of the lines are complete sentences or complete clauses. Thus, prosody would tell us, the line ends would be coterminous with a fall in intonation, indicating the end of that piece of information. The first sentence in the poem runs over two and a half lines. Each line contains a verb, in the first line a present participle, lines two and three with finite verbs. The ‘you’ at the start of line three appears to be the implicit subject of the participle ‘drowsing’ that begins that first line. And the sentence ends with the participle ‘rasping.’ From that first combination of the indefinite and the finite, we get a kind of litany of occurrences. But these occurrences are themselves quite indefinite: we do not know who the ‘bag’ men are; why is the evening a ‘cinder’ and why does it drop into their bag. We have some sense of the men’s conversation, but other than the suggestion that it is about the job in hand, we do not know what it is. The clouds are pointedly insubstantial. The bird is a ‘flash of wings.’ And we have the metonym of the ‘sail’ with the boat itself carefully elided, under those ‘tremendous shadows.’ And it may be that the ‘it’ in the final line is the boat indicated by the sail, will disappear.
The narrator aroused from the drowsing in the first line has, however, seen, been aware. Of course, it is the elision of all these elements that adds up to the ‘inconsequence’ of the title. Yet, the existence of the poem is a witness to what the narrator has ‘seen.’ The authorizing consciousness of the poem is, in the existence of the poem, making the reader witness to the events recorded. And it is part of Rouse’s undoubted skill that the reader does ‘witness,’ via the fragments so vividly reported.
As I’ve suggested, this kind of ‘reportage’ is a full part of this book. In poems such as ‘Late Swim,’ whose subject is as the title indicates a evening swim in the sea, it is Rouse’s descriptive abilities that bring such an ordinary event alive. ‘Stripped, I’m in, affronted, as long caverns / spill late reds; turn and idle on the swell, / while brief shapes cross a twilit promenade.’ That description of the waves on the shore as ‘long caverns’ that ‘spill late reds,’ is particularly effective and typical of the powers Rouse brings to observation.
Elsewhere, as mentioned above, the poems feel a lot more like an exploration of a fiction. Here, Rouse’s imagination is often allied to the quality of observation of the poems above. ‘Notes from a Moon Station’ begins,
Reliquary of streets and flowers
Swinging its dust behind for divers.
Topaz earthlight. At lunar midnight,
I fall into the ecstatic false sublime.
These apparitions float to us:
a threshold, tiled cream and russet.
Speckled flagstones.
They were blacking the land by the gate.
That wrinkled skein. Acheron.
It is interesting that Rouse has recently published short fiction; short fiction which she, herself, describes as ‘surreal.’ There is a great fullness to the writing of ‘Notes from a Moon Station.’ The narrator of the poem plunges into the space observed from the station and visualizes the lights and colours of that space as the remnants of objects and vistas. That visualization is pulled back from in the comment ‘the ecstatic false sublime,’ an interesting phrase which suggests the kind of educated sensibility that might be more like that of the writer and yet retains a power to affect the reader. And, although that phrase undercuts the visualization, neither the visualization or its presentation in the ‘notes’ are un-written; they constitute ‘the poem.’ That sense of the ‘false sublime,’ is further emphasized with the word ‘apparitions’ at the beginning of the next stanza. This stanza moves the reader further away from the ‘realities’ of space with the notion of space appearing as ‘Acheron,’ the river that flows into the gates of Hell in Greek mythology. The force of space as mythology is emphasized by the placing of the name in a sentence by itself.
‘Notes from a Moon Station’ ends thus,
Even now, the four messengers hover.
They deliver nightly to the camps: wormwood, laurels, prophecy.
Their garments bell out, their motionless.
We’re done, though, done with their four
swords meeting at star point, overhead.
Lead on, I shout, but they do not move.
The scenario sketched out here appears to echo some of those space films in which the spaceman becomes delusional. However, the power of Rouse’s writing ensures that the poem becomes original in its own way. The twenty lines of the poem pull the reader into a small and finely realized world. The persona of the poem might be delusional but the nature of the delusions becomes almost as real to us as it does to that persona.
Read the full article (on all Anne’s collections) here
Ian Pople, If Anything, Substack, July 2025
[On previous collections]:
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 Magazine
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