Carcanet Press - Marigold and Rose

Description
Author
Awards
Reviews

"Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.

Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. "Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow." The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. "It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know."

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

Louise Glűck is the author of twelve books of poems and two collections of essays. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Her other awards include the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, ... read more

Awards won by Louise Glück Winner, 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature Short-listed, 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection (Faithful and Virtuous Night) Short-listed, 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize (Faithful and Virtuous Night) Winner, 1993 Pulitzer Prize (The Wild Iris)

'This wry, read-in-a-sitting delight channels the myriad possibilities of fiction with a huge sense of fun.'

Justine Jordan, The Guardian Fiction Books of the Year 2022

'Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that's probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück's prose... like her poetry, it gains its force from acute observation'

Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

'Glück, in shrinking the world to the size of a pair of blankets inside cribs, manages to gently pack her narrative with feeling... This is a delicate, minor-key book. It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück's poetry.'

Dwight Garner, The New York Times

'In lesser hands Marigold and Rose could feel mawkish. But Glück, at 79, hasnât won most of the major literary prizes out there to mess this up. It's an affecting, alluring book. As soon as I'd finished I read it again.'

Susie Mesure, The Spectator

'Glück's challenge, which she elegantly achieves, is to channel her late wisdom into the simple yet surprising language and perspective of children... the themes of sisterhood, family, proximity, and the acquisition of language have long been Glück's hallmarks; here, she has transformed those themes with a shapeshifter's aplomb. Marigold and Rose could be read at bedtime between parents and children -or by anyone needing a masterclass in brief, compact storytelling with resonances for the very wise and the very innocent.'

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Telegraph

Praise for Louise Glück 'Glück has a keen sense of how humans look for beauty in what they missed or lost, the beauty there is in that and of course also the sadness: 'how ignorant we all are most of the time, / seeing things / only from one vantage, like a sniper.'

Kristian Vistrup Madsen, The White Review
'Scraps of family intimacy float in, Gluck's touch sometimes so light it comes to us as a murmur in the ear...a brave book'

Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry

'Glück's prose is simultaneously condensed, so that any one sentence takes time to properly unfold in the mind, and closely interwoven, so that highlighting a single sentence feels like doing violence to the intricate arguments her sentences form together... American Originality is a provocation and delight for anyone who takes writing seriously... It is an essential work by an essential artist.'

Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement

'Glück's talent is for saying the thing that might not feel true until it is put into words, as though we were on the therapist's couch. But she doesn't counsel or patronize - she's right on the couch next to the reader, hearing the lesson... Louise Glück has written some of the most incantatory, sorrowful, wrenching lyrics in American poetry. Her work is not for readers who want to be coddled, but for those who can apprehend that psychological dissonance, difficult as it may be to endure, is evidence of life.'

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Times Literary Supplement

'Glück's poems in this collection are quietly compelling as they suggest stories of sorrow and loss which are fundamental to our shared human existence.'

Kathleen Bell, The High Window

'Glück's skill is Orpheus-like: to travel to hellish depths and find a way back again. As we journey through such dark territories, we are grateful for her insight.'

Tanvi Roberts, Irish Times

Glucks first collection since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Memories, absent voices and clocks speak of the passage of time, and of the loss and decay left in time's wake. Yet there is also acceptance, coping and - as the 'collective' of the title suggests - an invitation to those readers 'who will know what I mean'.

Maria Crawford, Financial Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

'Silence has been prominent in Glück's work for decades... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence'

Elisa Gabbert, New York Times

'A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate's work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that's really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark... We're back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry'

Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
'These essays constitute long-form extensions of Gluck's own poetic concerns... people familiar with Glück's poetry will recognise this hallmark astringency and its attendant whiplash wit'

Dzifa Benson, The Poetry Review

'Gluck's essays are delicate, tactful, self-aware and wry; her sense of humour is so understated that you might miss it if you think of her solely as a poet of tenacity and autumnal smokiness... Reading American Originality alongside her first essay collection, Proofs and Theories (1994), a portrait emerges of a wilful, embattled child who earned her stern serenity not only through loss but also through that miraculous state of grace that poetry can provide'

Ange Mlinko, Literary Review

'In this collection of sharply focussed and insightful essays one unifying theme emerges. Despite all the fads and fashions, the dead ends and new waves of poetry one thing survives, and that as she so vividly reminds us, is poetry'

Roger Bloor, The Alchemy Spoon

'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.'
Washington Post 'Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.'
Partisan Review 'Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings.'
Publishers Weekly

Quote of the Day If it were not for Carcanet, my library would be unbearably impoverished. Louis de Bernieres Home Events Authors Titles Paperback Hardback Limited Edition Journal CD eBook Audiobook Exact Editions Imprints Anvil Press Poetry Aspects of Portugal Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Carcanet Poetry Fyfield Books Little Island Press Lives and Letters Northern House OxfordPoets PN Review Information About Us PN Review Turns 50 Years Old! Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! Academic Enquiries Authors for Events Catalogue Contact Us Copyright and Permissions Join Our Mailing List Opportunities at Carcanet Press Enquiries PN Review PN Review Creative Writing Prize Returns Policy Shopping Guide Stocklist Submission Guidelines Trade Information Resources Audio Gallery Reading Group Guides Video
Book Search Search > advanced search Subscribe to our mailing list
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas. Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.
Marigold and Rose A Fiction Louise Glück 10% off all versions Categories: 21st Century, American, Bestsellers, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Hardback (64 pages) (Pub. Oct 2022) 9781800172951 £12.99 £11.69 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Oct 2022) 9781800172968 £10.39 £9.35 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Author Awards Reviews "Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. "Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow." The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. "It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know." Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent. Louise Glűck is the author of twelve books of poems and two collections of essays. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Her other awards include the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, ... read more Awards won by Louise Glück Winner, 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature Short-listed, 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection (Faithful and Virtuous Night) Short-listed, 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize (Faithful and Virtuous Night) Winner, 1993 Pulitzer Prize (The Wild Iris) 'This wry, read-in-a-sitting delight channels the myriad possibilities of fiction with a huge sense of fun.' *Justine Jordan, The Guardian* Fiction Books of the Year 2022** 'Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that's probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück's prose... like her poetry, it gains its force from acute observation' Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'Glück, in shrinking the world to the size of a pair of blankets inside cribs, manages to gently pack her narrative with feeling... This is a delicate, minor-key book. It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück's poetry.' Dwight Garner, The New York Times 'In lesser hands Marigold and Rose could feel mawkish. But Glück, at 79, hasnât won most of the major literary prizes out there to mess this up. It's an affecting, alluring book. As soon as I'd finished I read it again.' Susie Mesure, The Spectator 'Glück's challenge, which she elegantly achieves, is to channel her late wisdom into the simple yet surprising language and perspective of children... the themes of sisterhood, family, proximity, and the acquisition of language have long been Glück's hallmarks; here, she has transformed those themes with a shapeshifter's aplomb. Marigold and Rose could be read at bedtime between parents and children -or by anyone needing a masterclass in brief, compact storytelling with resonances for the very wise and the very innocent.' Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Telegraph Praise for Louise Glück 'Glück has a keen sense of how humans look for beauty in what they missed or lost, the beauty there is in that and of course also the sadness: 'how ignorant we all are most of the time, / seeing things / only from one vantage, like a sniper.' Kristian Vistrup Madsen, The White Review 'Scraps of family intimacy float in, Gluck's touch sometimes so light it comes to us as a murmur in the ear...a brave book' Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry 'Glück's prose is simultaneously condensed, so that any one sentence takes time to properly unfold in the mind, and closely interwoven, so that highlighting a single sentence feels like doing violence to the intricate arguments her sentences form together... American Originality is a provocation and delight for anyone who takes writing seriously... It is an essential work by an essential artist.' Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement 'Glück's talent is for saying the thing that might not feel true until it is put into words, as though we were on the therapist's couch. But she doesn't counsel or patronize - she's right on the couch next to the reader, hearing the lesson... Louise Glück has written some of the most incantatory, sorrowful, wrenching lyrics in American poetry. Her work is not for readers who want to be coddled, but for those who can apprehend that psychological dissonance, difficult as it may be to endure, is evidence of life.' Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Times Literary Supplement 'Glück's poems in this collection are quietly compelling as they suggest stories of sorrow and loss which are fundamental to our shared human existence.' Kathleen Bell, The High Window 'Glück's skill is Orpheus-like: to travel to hellish depths and find a way back again. As we journey through such dark territories, we are grateful for her insight.' Tanvi Roberts, Irish Times Glucks first collection since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Memories, absent voices and clocks speak of the passage of time, and of the loss and decay left in time's wake. Yet there is also acceptance, coping and - as the 'collective' of the title suggests - an invitation to those readers 'who will know what I mean'. *Maria Crawford, Financial Times* Best Poetry Books of 2021** 'Silence has been prominent in Glück's work for decades... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence' Elisa Gabbert, New York Times 'A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate's work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that's really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark... We're back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry' Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'These essays constitute long-form extensions of Gluck's own poetic concerns... people familiar with Glück's poetry will recognise this hallmark astringency and its attendant whiplash wit' Dzifa Benson, The Poetry Review 'Gluck's essays are delicate, tactful, self-aware and wry; her sense of humour is so understated that you might miss it if you think of her solely as a poet of tenacity and autumnal smokiness... Reading American Originality alongside her first essay collection, Proofs and Theories (1994), a portrait emerges of a wilful, embattled child who earned her stern serenity not only through loss but also through that miraculous state of grace that poetry can provide' Ange Mlinko, Literary Review 'In this collection of sharply focussed and insightful essays one unifying theme emerges. Despite all the fads and fashions, the dead ends and new waves of poetry one thing survives, and that as she so vividly reminds us, is poetry' Roger Bloor, The Alchemy Spoon 'Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute. Not once in six books has she wavered from a formal seriousness, an unhurried sense of control and a starkness of expression that, like a scalpel, slices the mist dwelling between hope and pain.' Washington Post 'Gluck stands at the centre of time and speaks, not with raw emotion or linguistic abandon, but with the ageless urgency of questions about the soul.' Partisan Review 'Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings.' Publishers Weekly	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog We've Moved! read more Books of the Year read more One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
Privacy Statement Sitemap RSS Feeds Home Events Authors Titles Imprints Information Resources This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd

Marigold and Rose

A Fiction

Louise Glück