Ox-Eye

By Anne Rouse

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. Her 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. Ranging from her native east coast of America to her adopted home on the south coast of England, these incisive but often amused poems question how we view past and present, dismantling obsolete nostalgia, and casting a critical eye on what we wish for and what may happen instead. Ox-Eye is her fifth collection from Bloodaxe, appearing 14 years after her previous book, The Upshot: New & Selected Poems, which included the new poems of The Divided (2008), along with selections from her first three critically acclaimed earlier collections, Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing (1997) – both Poetry Book Society Recommendations – and The School of Night (2004).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780376097

Anne Rouse

Anne Rouse was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Virginia. After some years working in London as a psychatric nurse and mental health worker, she now lives in East Sussex. Her Bloodaxe retrospective The Upshot: New and Selected Poems included the new poems of The Divided (2008), along with selections from her first three critically acclaimed earlier collections, Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing (1997) – both Poetry Book Society Recommendations – and The School of Night (2004), and was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2008. A new collection, Ox-Eye, is published by Bloodaxe in 2022. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Glasgow (2000-02), Queen's University, Belfast (2004-05), and the Courtauld Institute, London (2008). Her short plays have been given rehearsed readings in Edinburgh and Hastings in the UK and in Virginia in the US.

Book preview

8

Moonrise 2021

Moonrise is unfamiliar,

arc of fire in a wash of blue,

plucked from night’s sleeve,

blotched disc of sun-glow.

Waddya want, a medal?

My late, wisecracking pre-war father.

Whatever’s hanging there,

brass or gilt, yes I do.

Freckled looking-glass, reflective

of our pocked aureole,

a stain has spread in its hollows.

Someone at prayer. A curving embryo.

9

Landfill

It wasn’t on the map, that spot we found.

Dogs ran, whirling at their owners’ shouts,

on the scrubby recreation ground;

we skirted a wood of hopeful oaks, and crossed

a second copse to a green: a hidden field

revealing, soon enough (a manhole cover, rusted vents)

that its lustrous grass, its collared doves, its tangled

fringe of buddleia and Queen Anne’s Lace,

rested on ravioli tins and Rich Tea