Quorum by Fuller, William

Description

‘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.