"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