EVERY lesson has a reflection in the last 5 minutes. WHAT - SO WHAT - NOW WHAT?

Cold Skin

INTRODUCTION

THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK

Steven Herrick was born in Brisbane, the youngest of seven children. At school, his favourite subject was soccer, and he dreamed of football glory while he worked at various jobs, including fruit picking. Now, he’s a full time writer and performs in many schools each year. He loves talking to students and their teachers about stories, poetry, soccer and even golf.

Steven Herrick is a poet whose body of work includes poetry collections for young people and adults such as Water Bombs, Love Poems and Leg Spinner, The Sound of Chopping and My Love, My Life, My Lasagne. He has also performed his poetry in pubs and public venues in Australia and overseas.

Steven Herrick is renowned for his verse novels for young readers and young adult readers including A place like this (1998), The spangled drongo (1999), The simple gift (2000), Tom Jones saves the world (2002), Do-wrong Ron (2003), By the river (2004), Naked bunyip dancing (2005) and Lonesome howl (2006). Several of his verse novels have won awards throughout Australia and have been released in the US and other countries. His works have been short-listed for Children’s Book Council Awards on a number of occasions, and have won various awards including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The young adult verse novel, The simple gift, has been listed in NSW on the HSC English text list – one of very few works by Australian poets to be listed in 2004-2005. Steven lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife and sons.

VISIT HIS WEBSITE

YOUNG ADULT VERSE NOVELS IN AUSTRALIA

Steven Herrick’s first verse novel was Love, ghosts & nose hair (1996). The publication of this book marks something of a watershed in narratives for young people as it re-introduced narratives told through verse. While narrative verse is as old as storytelling itself, Herrick’s work has taken narrative verse in new directions.

Other renowned Australian writers, such as Margaret Wild, Libby Hathorn and Catherine Bateson have also turned their hand to verse novels for young adults and younger readers and this has allowed them to tell some different kinds of stories in a compact format. The developing genre of the young adult (YA) verse novel has become a significant story-telling genre in Australia – even though it causes some librarians a degree of angst in determining where such books should be shelved in libraries – with the poetry or with the novels.

THE YA VERSE NOVEL GENRE

The young adult (YA) verse novel genre is now well established in Australia and the USA. Verse novels commonly allow the poet to tell a story from more than one perspective. In Herrick’s first collection of poems, Water Bombs (1992), we find the essential features of the verse novel in the series of vignettes from the perspectives of the two main characters Joe and Debbie – adolescents who grow up in the same neighbourhood, go the same school, become friends, fall out, get back together “in Year 11” and eventually marry and have a son – “Joe Junior”. There is a loose narrative thread that binds these vignettes of juxtaposed poems in the individual voices of the characters into a connected story. Herrick’s subsequent verse novels build on these essential features and extend and expand them to explore more complex issues and relationships. The hybrid form of the verse novel draws upon not only narrative poetry, but also lyric and dramatic poetry forms. The individual poems spoken in the voice of different characters are similar to the soliloquy in a play in which a character directly addresses the audience. The juxtaposition of these monologues allows the reader to hear the different characters’ perspectives on the events. In some ways the contemporary Australian verse novel has much in common with ancient Greek drama.

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