Anne Rouse

American British poet (born 1954)

Anne Barrett Rouse (born September 26, 1954) is an American British poet. She has been cited as a noted American British contributor to contemporary British poetry.

She was born in Washington, D. C., grew up in Virginia and read history at the University of London. Afterwards, she worked as a nurse and as the director of the mental health charity Islington Mind. Now a freelance writer, she has had numerous residencies, including fellowships at the University of Glasgow and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Rouse has been described by the International Poetry Society as an "accomplished and intelligent writer" and by Don Paterson and Charles Simic in their anthology New British Poetry as a poet of "great formal deftness", with a fine gift for social themes incorporated into her poetry. Rouse, in her earlier works, often draws upon her experiences as a nurse and mental health worker. Her poems often fuse together the ordinary and the bizarre, often with use of satire and humour. All four of her collections to date have been published by Bloodaxe Books, including Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing (1997), A number of her poems have appeared in anthologies, such as New British Poetry (2004). Several of the poems in Timing were written as performances pieces, such as "Spunk Talking," and many of them have been described as being "hymns to the momentary and the marvelously futile: physical love, football, the preoccupations of patients on a dementia ward, fashion, and poetry itself." In 2004 she recorded her poems "Childminding," "The Anaesthetist," "Sighting," and "Testament" for the British Council. In 2008, Rouse published a poetry collection, entitled The Upshot: New and Selected Poems. This included the poem sequence "The Divided," which has been described as constructing "a modern meta physic out of love and the daily, set against the latent (sometimes tragic) divisions in contemporary society." Rouse has also collaborated with the composer Morgan Hayes, the artist Emily Johns, and the artist and graphic designer Erica Smith.

Rouse was formerly a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.