Review: Letter to ‘Oumuamua

James Norcliffe’s latest poetry collection, Letter to ‘Oumuamua, addresses itself to the first interstellar object identified in our solar system and thus gives Norcliffe the freedom to keenly observe and poke fun at the absurdities of human life on Earth. The collection focuses on several hot issues, including climate change and gun violence, but also makes room for smaller, human reactions: our capacity to put our heads in the sand, to care and to love. In Penguin Modern Classics, a shoutout to those beloved editions, this gem appears:

 We cannot help being dog-eared,

 fly-spotted and ever so slightly foxed

 as you are, dear reader, as you are, even as

 the fire goes out and the coffee goes cold.

Norcliffe was recently awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and this is his 11th collection. With 58 poems in five sections, it explores the human inability to consider every societal issue, and how we focus and fixate on the most immediate before us, ignoring the future. This theme resonates through the collection, especially in Really Hot Soup, the titular poem of section 3, which considers this in detail via extended metaphor. It speaks to the whole work, a polished, clever collection by an accomplished poet.

REALLY HOT SOUP

Really hot soup is a change in the statistical distribution of soup patterns

when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e decades to

millions of years). Really hot soup may refer to a change in average soup

conditions, or in the time variation of soup within the context of longer-

term average conditions.

Warmer soup is caused by factors such as calorific processes, variations in

hot plate conditions received by plate tectonics, and volcanic over-flowing.

Certain human activities have been identified as primary causes of ongoing

really hot soup, often referred to as over-spicing.

Scientists actively work to understand past and future soup conditions by

using observations and theoretical models. A culinary record – extending

deep into the kitchen’s past – has been put together, and continues to be

built up, based on evidence of hotplate temperature profiles, bench-top

stains and other analyses of soup layers, and records of past warm soup

levels.

More recent data are provided by the instrumental record. Future patterns

of potentially really, really hot soup, based on the physical sciences, are

often used in theoretical approaches to match past warm soup data, make

future projections, and link causes and effects of catastrophically hot soup.

This is an ongoing situation and potentially a very, very serious one, but

there appears to be no easy solution.

People seem not to appreciate the very real dangers of really hot soup, not

even when they’re in it.

Reviewed by Erica Stretton