Often, the Dorset folklore had to do with farming. There’s one [piece of folklore] in the poem where, if a cow calves too early, and the calf dies, you take that calf and you put it in a maiden ash tree, a very young ash tree, facing east. And that’s supposed to stop the rest of the cattle from calving too early. Maybe it was just something to hang onto, to feel like you were protecting yourself — more in the way that some people might pray in times of need as a way of protection, or a way of feeling safer. 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 byOrlam, 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.

PJ Harvey Announces New Narrative Poetry Book ‘Orlam’ Out PJ Harvey Announces New Narrative Poetry Book ‘Orlam’ Out

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: Where do you see Orlam reflecting your own childhood in Dorset? There are lots of references to things in the Seventies. 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. 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?

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. January serves as an introduction to the villagers of UNDERWHELEM. Then, with the arrival of February Ira’s pet lamb, Sonny dies, as the sap rises in Gore Woods.

PJ Harvey Poetry – PJ Harvey

It Doesn’t Feel Dark to Me’: PJ Harvey on Her Surreal New Novel, Growing Older, and the Beauty of Ugliness With [my 2011 album] Let England Shake, I was so absorbed with reading war poets — not just First World War, but across all wars — and I found the need to put very ugly things into beautiful language. Quite often poems of great beauty are describing something very violent or very ugly. This was really intriguing to me. So I wanted to try and create lyrics of great beauty to describe these terrible, terrible things that were happening, in the way that poets had done for centuries. And that was what began to really get me interested in wanting to become a better poet. 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?” After a long six-year creation process, PJ Harveyhas announced that her new narrative poetry book Orlam will be released in 2022.

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.

Orlam by PJ Harvey | Waterstones

This long, narative poem recalls the England of Masefield, Cooper and Garner; a world of frost and hard choices, of sunlit glades and shaded love, of seasons turning and everything but nothing changing. I appreciated the dirty words in the Dorset dialect in Orlam, too, like “munter,” which you wrote in a footnote meant “fugly.” det här var ljuvt på många sätt. fin skitig poesi på engelska mystiska landsbygden. skriven på dorset-dialekt och med översättning bredvid! A special edition with extraordinary illustrations made by the author during the period in which the book was written. Enjoy the convenience of having The Sunday Post delivered as a digital ePaper straight to your smartphone, tablet or computer.The book has a character named Wyman-Elvis who sings “Love Me Tender.” What does Elvis Presley mean to you? 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. People think I live in a cave and eat children,” says PJ Harvey, her West Country burr dissolving into a giggle.

PJ Harvey to Publish Book-Length Poem Orlam | Pitchfork PJ Harvey to Publish Book-Length Poem Orlam | Pitchfork

From X Files to X Factor: Sci-fi star David Duchovny on returning to his ancestral Scottish homeland and his long-awaited romcom debut 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. interesting poem or collection of poems, told in a rural English dialect and seeming to revolve around that communities traditions, superstitions and farming life 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. 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)?With I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey has again crafted something with no precedent in her discography: a hallucinatory dreamworld woven from non-traditional folk instruments, primitive electronics, and field recordings warped and distorted beyond recognition. She adapted these 12 songs from her 2022 book Orlam, an epic narrative poem that she spent the better part of a decade completing, in part because it required mastering the nearly forgotten dialect of Dorset, the English county where she was raised. Her verses depict an upbringing presumably something like her own but heightened by fantasy, juxtaposing the mundanities and seasonal rhythms of rural youth—school days, farm work, sexual awakenings—against a blend of horror and magical realism. 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. I was in my late teens, early twenties when I’d written some of those songs. At that time, it was a type of expression I needed. And things change. You get older and you don’t need to express yourself in that same way and you need to find other ways of expression. A natural question, given PJ Harvey’s considerable musical output, is whether she intends to perform her poetry in song? She has in fact indicated ambitions to develop Orlam into a stage or film dramatisation. The stirring powers of nature, vicarious childhood misadventures and trappings of popular culture certainly make for a rich subject matter. 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.