Available Light

Audrey Rooney

In her second collection of poetry, Audrey Rooney explores the joys of the present moment from the perspective and experiences of a well-lived life. We can all learn from the wisdom, generosity of spirit, as well as the language precision of these poems.

What Others Say About Available Light

In this impressive new collection, Audrey Rooney gives us poems that evoke the sensibilities of Wordsworth and, more in tune with our time, Mary Oliver. These poems show us how our lives can be enriched by paying close attention to the earth and what it offers.

—Jeff Worley

Audrey Rooney is the erudite and approachable docent we all need to guide us on our slow drift toward the afterlife. What luck to have a master of not just poetry but of voice and visual art showing us with thoughtful observance the simple wonder and ache of our sunset years. Her newest poetry collection, Available Light, sings in my ear, commands my eye long after I've put it down.

—Christopher McCurry

Audrey Rooney's Available Light is in love with the world of texture and light. It holds up the ordinary miracles of brown eggs under cool running water. Enter her world and you'll come out the other side more observant and alive. You can almost feel the rain in the trees.

—Pat Owen

Midden

Rummaging deep in the freezer yesterday turning
over bags of blueberries blintzes pea soup two

pewter skinned brook trout near the bottom numb
fingers closed on a heel of brown bread a surprise

My cupped hands held what's left of what your earthy
golden hands mixed and let rise pummeled caressed

and baked last summer then brought to me to us

Today the thawed bread smells oven fresh as it falls
in crusty slices under my mother-in-law's rough blade

of carbon steel I break the end chunk in pieces taste again
the rich plainness of you a quarter-curve of earth away
and fill my mouth with absence two for breakfast ever?

Who says half a loaf is better than none?

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: October 15, 2019
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-52-0
Price: $16.00

About the Author

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.