... exists in a liminal zone between poetry and prose. It can resemble a sophisticated children’s bedtime story ... This dichotomy, the idea that the world can be divided neatly into people who lead with their hearts and those who lead with their heads, can feel reductive. Yet Glück, in shrinking the world to the size of a pair of blankets inside cribs, manages to gently pack her narrative with feeling ... Glück wrings more emotion than you might imagine out of a father’s going and coming home from work every day ... A cynic might call this a children’s book for very pretentious children. You can imagine it with red and black illustrations by Barbara Kruger, with oracular phrases printed in that artist’s signature typeface ... This is a delicate, minor-key book. It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück’s poetry.
Ever the poet, Glück chooses each word carefully and leaves only the necessary and true on the page, so Marigold and Rose is a decidedly slim volume, but it holds a wealth of insight ... it would be easy for Marigold and Rose to slip into sentimentality. Instead, the simplicity of the subject matter serves to elevate each moment of brilliance. The babies are bathed, they sleep in separate cribs, they learn to drink from a cup--all ordinary moments that are somehow transfigured. Glück suggests that these moments of deep learning in early childhood are accompanied by equally deep interiority ... becomes something more than observations of very young children; it is a reflection on life and learning, time and the passing of time, and always--always--the choosing of just the right words.
... a stunningly imaginative, incisive, sly, and hilarious leap of imagination ... Concentrating the depth, rigor, and complexity of her poems into a delectably renegade, mordant, and bravura prose performance, Glück tracks the love and rivalry between these little philosophers as they ponder the nature of family, gender roles, how children are underestimated, the body-mind problem, time, and even death as they reach their one-year birthday. While Marigold’s urge to narrate, to write, to transmute life into story, is a wily exploration of the perpetual compulsiveness of artists, Glück’s breathtakingly disarming double portrait also succinctly and provocatively illuminates the vagaries of human consciousness, the bewitchment of language, and the mysterious assertion of the self.
