Marigold and Rose

This is the fascinating tale of what goes on in the minds of twin girls in the first year of their lives. As they watch, play, and listen, the world slowly opens to them in curious and mysterious ways. Most importantly, the words appear and attach themselves to things, people, and actions.

Louise Glück, who in 2020 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poetry, articulates in poetic prose fragments how an emerging mind may experience the world as an amazing ensemble of original appearances and peculiar events whose truth and existence can be accepted or simply rejected. The… show more.

Marigold and Rose is subtitled "a fiction," something the Nobel Prize-winning poet has not usually had to append to her books. Yet poetry, however confessional or emotionally astute (as hers is), is always a kind of composition, too – so, a kind of fictionalization of a sensibility, an insight, an experience.

This magically elegant book tells the story of twin girls moving through infancy. It explores how it is possible for us to have pre-verbal concepts, what love and identity are: a whole load of philosophical and emotional questions. But because it’s written by this poet of family life, it… show more.