Lucy thinks it’s a feral dog that was once her pet, but escaped her father’s wrath.
Jake wonders about fate: Is he tied to the land as his parents are? And is his father always right? The two eventually decide to take a pilgrimage into the rocky forest in search of a wolf that they think they hear howling every night, even though wolves are not known to inhabit that terrain. Her story alternates with that of her neighbor, 15-year-old Jake Jackson. The one that weighs most heavily in Lucy’s heart is what to do about her abusive and alcoholic dad who keeps the women in the family in fear of violence. That’s an issue, but it’s not the one that concerns Lucy most. They don't kiss much, but when they do, Debbie says, her head spins, her knees go weak and she hears Elvis Presley singing Love Me Tender.Lucy Harding lives on the appropriately named Battle Farm, located in an isolated and inhospitable area of Australia.
At 51, he's a teacher, married to Debbie, with a child. But Debbie thinks Joe is a terrible kisser: ''He's got lips like a dead fish.''Īt 14, Joe is over girls and practising kissing on the mirror: he's going to play for Collingwood.
The kissing doesn't go too well: ''It was all right until she opened her mouth and I tasted spit,'' says Joe. ''I'm lost in the mist,'' he recited, ''and it's worse than being kissed!'' But the last word on kissing is the romantic saga of Joe and Debbie, who meet at the age of nine. One request was for a poem he wrote for five-year-olds. Yesterday he kept up a rapid-fire delivery of poems. He saw the show with an audience, and everyone laughed when the poet was shot. In the past 20 years he's performed in front of a quarter of a million people in Australia, Canada and Croatia and on a television show where some drug addicts who didn't like his poetry shot him. His poems don't rhyme, because he feels poetry should be about the way we talk. He writes verse novels and has just finished his first young adult prose novel, Slice. Now he makes a living from publishing and performing poetry. ''I thought, 'This is fantastic! I'm going to be a poet.' '' Herrick, a poet for the past 33 years, said his first poem was titled Love is Like a Gobstopper. Or not when it's about the sort of subjects that concern teens, such as football, nose hair and kissing. Judging from the reception from his teenage audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival yesterday, poetry isn't a bad thing at all. Plenty of things, Herrick thought: the Taliban, school seven days a week, war, cabbage, your hair falling out and growing back in your ears, Collingwood winning the premiership. STEVEN Herrick was waiting one day to give a school talk about his poems when he overheard one boy say to another: ''Poetry! What could be worse than poetry?''
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