If all this sounds a little abstruse, the language is even more so, since it's all written in Dorset dialect. And sometimes, admittedly, this can look a little alarming: Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier- ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender. Having spent six years working on Orlam with my friend, mentor, and editor Don Paterson, I am very happy to publish this book of poetry with Picador. Picador feels absolutely the right home for it, and it’s an honor to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley, and Carol Ann Duffy,” PJ Harvey shared in a statement about the book. Harvey was awarded an MBE for services to music as well as an Honorary Degree in Music from Goldsmiths University. She has received numerous Grammy Award nominations, has scored music for several tv, film and theatrical productions, and is the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice with her albumsStories from the City, Stories from the SeaandLet England Shake.

Orlam by P J Harvey Louder Than War Orlam by P J Harvey Louder Than War

Once or twice I'm reminded of her old beau's And the Ass Saw the Angel; the heavy dialect, the brutality of adolescence, the ensouling of the world; but this is a far more mature, controlled work, without ever losing the perspective of the child telling it. And a lot of the [characters] have two names, so it’s like a dual personality. I was very interested in that blurring of reality and fiction, imagination and inventing things or actually using real sources. It’s all mixed up. And in fact, I think that as a creative artist, no matter what media you work in, we sort of absorb everything one’s ever seen, felt, dreamt, read, or seen. It goes into your being and is absorbed and swishes around and mixes with your real memories and your real experience and gets churned up. And it’s sort of remade and comes out of you in a new form. So I don’t really distinguish between the fact and the imagination because they’re all as real to me. But perhaps that kind of thing might be expected from a songwriter producing a book of poetry. What's more surprising is just how good her individual word choices are and how brilliantly she wields language in general, without the comfort of any musical support. PJ Harvey comments: “Having spent six years working onOrlamwith my friend, mentor and editor DonPaterson, I am very happy to publish this book of poetry with Picador. Picador feels absolutely the right home for it, and it’s an honour to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley and Carol Ann Duffy.” Full-time Students, Under 26’s, visitors with disability or impairment (one carer get free entrance), people in receipt of Pension Credit, Universal Credit, Income Support or Job Seekers allowance.Her latest work may not shift the dial on people’s perception of her. Orlam is a novel-in-verse telling the dark coming-of-age tale of a Dorset farmgirl exploring a magical forest via her guide and protector in the form of a lamb’s eyeball. The collection of poems is at times unsettling, bawdy and darkly humorous; much like her music. Yet where albums like 2011’s Let England Shake, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, or her previous collection of poems, The Hollow Of The Hand, dealt with grand political themes and the impact of war, Orlam reads as a deeply personal tale, albeit one set in the hinterlands between reality and dream, and youth and adulthood.

PJ Harvey on superstition, dialect and poetry - New Statesman PJ Harvey on superstition, dialect and poetry - New Statesman

If there were cade lambs — a cade lamb is an orphan lamb — you would then hand-rear them. If it was that situation, it was difficult to not become attached to them. Although we try not to because ultimately a farm is a working business, and at some point those lambs, when they’re older, are going to have to go for meat. Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira's sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb's eyeball who is Ira-Abel's guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children's songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. When she hasn’t been working on poetry, she has been recording a new album, due out next summer. “I’m very pleased with it,” she says of the music. “It took a long time to write to get right, but at last I feel very happy with it.” Here, in a rare interview, Harvey explains how Orlam originated and reflects on her music career. She said: “It was so interesting for me to learn the Dorset dialect and study it like one would study a foreign language and I learned it until it become part of my system.

Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira’s sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb’s eyeball who is Ira-Abel’s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants, and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow—suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song, and bawdy humour. det här var ljuvt på många sätt. fin skitig poesi på engelska mystiska landsbygden. skriven på dorset-dialekt och med översättning bredvid!

Orlam – a beautiful and profound narrative poem by PJ Harvey

For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)?Orlamfollows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender.

PJ Harvey PJ Harvey

He said, ‘no, I really did want to see some of your poems’,” adds Harvey. “and I said, ‘oh gosh yeah’. Things found in gorse woods- these picture snapshots of terror and wonderment of childhood in the woods- I like these the most Dorset dialect? Well maybe. I've worked with Dorset farmers and some of it was good, but some I thought just wrong. To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood. Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira’s sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb’s eyeball who is Ira-Abel’s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world.Far from the pastoral madding crowds of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, PJ Harvey contours an altogether more gritty and at times ominous exposé of rustic traditions, woven through a tableau of natural world simplicities and charms. Well, I loved Elvis, as a lot of children of my era did, and I still love Elvis. I love everything about him. I could lose myself in that voice, but not only that, the way he looked as well. He is almost a godlike figure in Orlam. It's a linguistic dream, with each poem printed in standard English and in the Dorset dialect. The standard English versions appear in lighter or darker font depending on the density of the dialect. As you move through it, you get to know the Dorset dialect (if you aren't already familiar) and you depend less on the English print. There's also a glossary of terms at the end and footnotes throughout.