Through the poems in this brilliant debut collection, Audrey Rooney explores timeless concepts from love and loss to aging and nature. This book contains poems of diverse shapes, forms and sizes, as well as several translations of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, matched with Audrey’s poignant responses to Rilke’s work.

Accents will be hosting a premiere for Fountains for Orpheus at the Carnegie Center in Lexington, Kentucky on August 18th. Details available here.

Fountains for Orpheus is available at the Accents store.

What Others Say About Fountains for Orpheus

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

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 Fountains for Orpheus, 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. Fountains for Orpheus is a volume to savor.

—George Ella Lyon