"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 ...
Read More
"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.
Read Less