Marigold and Rose 'Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.' So begins Marigold and Rose 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 Glu¨ck has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.