The Decadent Movement

The poems of Laura Kolbe do more than just continue the noble tradition of physician-poets; in The Decadent Moment they redefine the relations between body and body, mind and mind, mother and child. The book’s astonishing final poem is an apostrophe to the not-yet-existent that ‘cannot be studied or moved’ but can be talked to. What bodies can do, and must do, is anticipate lovingly.

The intricate, barreling, and multifarious poems in The Decadent Movement explore the fraught situation of motherhood with tremendous excitement and frankness. Here is maternity as dilemma and possibility, a cluster of grand yearnings and workaday hazards. The desire to maintain a distinct, inner world comes up against separation as cosmic lostness; and yet, merger is engulfment as well as paradise. All the way through, Laura Kolbe’s self-consciousness about transformation keeps things bracingly restless, playful even, full of pleasure-pain.

It is a rare privilege to be inside the mind of this poet as she unspools the chronicle, told in reverse, of the arduous, hallucinatory, and utterly mortal time of pregnancy and early parenthood. With her, we experience the shock of what happens to a body, a marriage, an artist’s mind, as she becomes a mother. These poems are beautiful, intelligent, honest, funny, conflicted, hopeful, and real, and tell us the oldest story in a new and necessary way.

Laura Kolbe’s sonic, wordsmithy poems are granular and cosmic, traveling that edge where inner and outer space meet, where these poems spill like milk off the page, strange, sticky, fluid, flowing, alive. In this realm, maternal reality is lived, living, imminent and insistent, and repeating, echoing, lapping, lapsing, collapsing, collecting. Here, the poet’s mind makes real a mother’s life—so often fragmented—meeting chaos with textured, visceral lines that furnish a world, tend a family, and inscribe a full self in full bloom.