Orlam

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But if I’d asked my grandmother this she would have felt like the world was probably always been frightening. I remember talking about when televisions and telephones first appeared and she was sort of terrified at what was happening. It’s all contextual, isn’t it?” Ira-Abel Rawles gives a child’s eye view of life on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Nearby, the magic realist domain of Gore Woods transcends time and folklore prevails. Here Orlam, an all-seeing dead lamb’s eyeball and oracle of UNDERWHELEM, is Ira’s protector. Another dweller of Gore, Wyman-Elvis, a ghost warrior from the Ransham Rebellion, ricochets whispering ‘Love Me Tender’ echoes throughout the verses. Further song lyrics from bands such as Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues enter the stream of consciousness. Which, alongside peanut butter sandwiches and fizzy pop anchor Ira’s approaching adolescence in the late 20th Century zeitgeist. While Orlam is divided into chapters following the months of a year, each with a précis summarizing the imaginative storyline—the title character is the oracular, amputated eye of a lamb who acts as guardian of a nine-year-old girl coming of age in the village of Underwhelem—the poems work less as coherent narrative than as a series of lyrical vignettes, sometimes set in the 1970s, sometimes timeless or ancient, that create a pastoral scene out of folk superstition, children’s ditties, Christian lamb imagery, Elvis’s “Love Me Tender,” and poetry, from Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf to Geoffrey Hill. Harvey’s otherworldly voice reaches for and occasionally touches something profound and archaic, as in “Prayer at the Gate” ( soonere = ghost, drisk = mist, holway = lost lane, teake = reach): Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. 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:

Orlam - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey Orlam - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey

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. I very much thought I was going to go to art college, because that was what I was supposed to do. I had a place to study fine art as a degree at Saint Martin’s [School of Art] in London. I really wanted to do that. I’ve always painted and drawn. I still do. And I was set to do that course, but then I deferred it when I got offered a record deal for Dry. And then even at the time of Rid of Me, I thought, “Oh, well I’m allowed to make one more album.” But then I was able to just continue doing this. He said, ‘no, I really did want to see some of your poems’,” adds Harvey. “and I said, ‘oh gosh yeah’. On your last tour, you sang Rid of Me’s “50ft Queenie.” How do those early songs, where you’re hollering, feel to you now? det här var ljuvt på många sätt. fin skitig poesi på engelska mystiska landsbygden. skriven på dorset-dialekt och med översättning bredvid!Just before noon on a recent Monday, a queue stretched from the doors of Conway Hall, the central London home of the Ethical Society. The 400 or so people awaited an unusual pairing: PJ Harvey, one of our most enigmatic musicians, in conversation with Frank Skinner, one of our most familiar comedians. Her poetry about the haunted Gore Wood conjures vivid imagery, enough maybe to lend itself to other types of art. Does she hope it might become something else, like a movie? A beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country by musician and writer PJ Harvey. After a long six-year creation process, PJ Harveyhas announced that her new narrative poetry book Orlam will be released in 2022. This year has marked a number of reissues from the esteemed PJ Harvey catalog, including most recently, A Woman A Man Walked By, the second collaborative album by PJ Harvey and John Parish, that was reissued this past July.

Orlam by P.J. Harvey | Goodreads

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. Love the Dorset dialect - munter! Gawly gurrel; empty girl; panking- panting. Three milchi being the hAnglo Saxon name for May because you could milk the cows three times a day on the lushness of May grass

Orlam evokes existential dread, that the ‘hag -ridden hollow’ of Underwhelem of ‘Jeyes Fluid, slurry, zweat and pus, anus grease, squitters, jizz and blood,’ is what defines life. The sense of despair of the human soul caught in the no-time of a sentient landscape reminds me of Alan Garner’s Cheshire dialect books… Thursbitch, in particular. Over the past few years, you have released the demos to every album you’ve put out so far. As you went through those, was there anything that made you clench your teeth like, “Do I want to put this out there?” A novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular, Orlam is a curious and enchanting thing. Like a dark poetic almanac, it charts, month by month, a year in which its heroine, nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, leaves behind the innocence of her childhood. PJ Harvey was born in Dorset in 1969. Her debut poetry collection,The Hollow of the Hand,was created in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy. As stated in the ‘Note on the Text’, the book is a work of the imagination. Nine-year-old Ira-Abel and her rural community seem to exist in a timewarp, in which signs of modernity appear alongside superstitious beliefs and practices of the past.

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

As I’ve begun to appreciate the formal skills of poets and of poetry writing, I’ve found that I’m more drawn to different poets now than I was when I was younger. I think some of the greatest poets for me, particularly — and also poets that had a great influence on me whilst writing Orlam— would’ve been William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an amazing book called A Child’s Garden of Verses that was written all from the child’s point of view. There are some graphic scenes in Orlam of assault and bestiality, which were surprising. But at the same time, it’s not too different from reading a Flannery O’Connor story, looking at the darkness through a different lens.Harvey – the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice, for her albums Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) and Let England Shake (2011) – was born in Dorset in 1969. The West Country is the setting for her narrative poem, Orlam, a folkloric coming-of-age story and her second poetry book. Harvey, who wore an embroidered dress and heeled, white, lace-up boots, read aloud from the book, which she wrote in the rural Dorset dialect. “This is how the wordle is” – this is how the world turns – she sang, lullaby-like, over a rugged, ambient score that she had composed. 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.

PJ Harvey, poet: ‘Dorset is light and dark, ecstasy and PJ Harvey, poet: ‘Dorset is light and dark, ecstasy and

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.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. Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022. She knows about the importance of endings in life and in poetry: “When I’ve read the ending of a great poem, I catch my breath… In my own poems, I don’t want to tell people what to feel. I want to open the doorway so they can find out for themselves. It can be hard to know when a poem is finished. But once finished, it’s finished – it’s of its time and place. And I will have the desire – always – to move forward and to do something else.”