marigold and rose
Louise Louise Louise. I love you!
I first came across Louise’s writing during the recording of a history podcast episode on Pomegranates.
Louise is the author of a gorgeous poem called: Persephone the Wanderer. It’s so good – Louise is so brilliant at writing about being a woman. Without awkwardly spelling it out. She honours its archaic history, the weight that millennia of quiet suffering and beauty holds, and the way it’s all been passed down. Through the body, through whispers and folk stories, all the way from Ancient Greek mythology. But then there’s this simplicity in her poems which can only be achieved from an incredible technical precision. And makes her poems so modern and unpretentious and obvious? I feel almost vindicated, or understood.
I love her writing. And I hope to dedicate more time to reading it. Anyways she’s a nobel prize winning poet. But she wrote a short book!
This is it. Marigold and Rose.
The book is written from the perspective of twin babies Marigold and Rose. Well of Marigold. She says ‘I am the brain and Rose is the heart. Or was it the other way?’
I know it sounds strange, a book written from the perspective of a baby. But it’s done so so sweetly! Gluck captures this naivety, desire to observe and learn from ones environment, and the very beginnings of growth in just 55 pages.
It is so difficult to explain what’s great about this book. Detecting and naming the really quite unique feelings this book provided me with is too tough! I felt like a different younger me was being spoken to. I think anyone would, reading this.
The most gorgeous part of this story to me are Marigold’s references and views of her mother. Like a positive bright force, whose attention means so many things to how Marigold perceives herself. There’s a really interesting through-line of Marigold believing that she is more like her father, the logical, pensive, inward, one. I think she already has this sense of being misunderstood. And instead she sees her sister Rose as loud, clumsy, not afraid to make mistakes. But also as protective and forgiving, and understood. Rose earns her mother’s affection effortlessly.
This comparison between the two girls that seems almost (but not quite) innate in Marigold, is sweet and sad.
With her writing, Louise helps these girls begin to understand the most incomprehensible of topics. Truth and lies and absence and safety.
Although I haven’t really demonstrated it, I promise, this book is actually maybe even a bit funny.
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