Quorum

"Quorum", the latest book from William Fuller, is a collection of vivid detours and deadpan visions arranged into forty-five sonnet-like poems. Employing an ear "that hears not what the eye / sees not, in detail," the poet makes his rounds through a menagerie of abstract persons and personified abstractions, carefully feeding them "their weight in flowers," to achieve the idiosyncratic consistency of a world transected by allusive filaments of "clouds that don't exist." Metaphysical wit both freezes the system and gives it a liquidity but "there's a trace of something else that slips in," which the poet seems at pains to not identify. Neither song, nor simple irony, these poems have their own distinct and intriguing voice.