Fountains for orpheus

Poetry August 2016 ISBN 978-1-936628-45-2 58 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"In Fountains for Orpheus, Audrey Rooney invites us to bring our artist eyes to the beauty-filled and bewildering scenes of her well-lived life. 'Come, Gardener,' she writes, and we are introduced to a world of violet skies, river deaths, and small talk. She's a keen writer, wise and intelligent. Emotionally, she never strays far from her music or her man. Congratulations to Audrey for this delightful debut collection!"—Neil Chethik

nature

From the Book

For the Boys

The girls with clean shoes and Barbies had rules, couldn’t sleep out with us, didn’t have their lawns spoiled by baseball in summer, football in fall, garden hose floods for winter skating. The boys didn’t seem to notice I was a girl, maybe short hair and bruised knees were camouflage enough; they welted me with dodge balls just the same. I liked their talk, and trouble, learned things I shouldn’t know like what happens when you pour water on a gasoline fire, and how it is to have your wind knocked out. Mostly the wind was behind us as we rode our bikes down topsoil cliffs, leaped off swings into space. Like the boys at the pier who taught me to fish for bait from the bucket, calling me Worm Woman with a bit of pride, they raised me, found a place for me when I had no fishing stuff of my own. I want those boys to know that my daughter can change her own oil, and that I am almost never afraid.

What Others Say

In The Compost Reader, Audrey Rooney invites us to bring our artist eyes to the beauty-filled and bewildering scenes of her well-lived life. "Come, Gardener," she writes, and we are introduced to a world of violet skies, river deaths, and small talk. She's a keen writer, wise and intelligent. Emotionally, she never strays far from her music or her man. Congratulations to Audrey for this delightful debut collection!

— Neil Chethik

Audrey Rooney's painterly poems reveal our ordinary world for the fresh miracle it is—charged and shining in the carnelian flash of flagstones, in the tulip poplar's "egg-cup" blooms, green as luna moths. Lovely as their images are, however, these poems are no mere surfaces. In The Compost Reader, Rooney's poems pursue loss, change, and imperfection—hers, ours. Often quirky, never somber (though they circle death) these poems reward reading and rereading. They probe the uncertain edges where winter passes into spring, where death invades life and "creatures given to our care make no promises not to break our hearts one day." What are the dead to the living or the living to the dead? Rooney asks, as Rilke did. And as Rilke's did, Audrey Rooney's poems find a way to "love the in-betweens.

— Leatha Kendrick

Meticulously observed and elegantly composed, Rooney's poems celebrate and mourn the beauty of nature, the transcendence of art, and the death of the beloved. They write back to Rilke, examine a childhood relic from her lost brother, embrace grandchildren, and everywhere render the music of this world with learning and longing. The Compost Reader is a volume to savor.

— George Ella Lyon

About the Author

Audrey Rooney

Audrey Rooney, three times a Kentucky resident, now living in Lexington, recalls a life filled with words. Her mother was a published poet active in Cleveland, where Audrey was born in 1938. An October baby, she heard "October's Bright Blue Weather" every birthday and learned her alphabet sitting on the living room floor perplexed by gold letters on Britannica spines: RAYN to SAAR, SARS to SORC. Her dad promised her a dollar for memorizing them all and she did. As a journalist she has published in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky. She is a trained soprano and her watercolors and drawings hang in collections in this country and abroad. Undergraduate philosophy studies, two post-graduate forays, (MA in art history, doctorate in history), a long marriage, a daughter and a son, their daughter and sons, clusters of wondrous friends—all tinctured with loss and discovery—prompt this first book of poems gathered in memory of James R. Rooney.