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 freezes up the system and then gives it a liquidity. But “there’s a trace of something else that slips in,” which the poet seems at pains to not identify. If it’s not quite song, neither is it simply irony, nor is it a desire to exceed these, although all are required to make a quorum.