This doubling slows down the reader who cares to be slowed, allowing them to puzzle out the dialect words and the way they change the poems. She divides her life these days between London and Dorset, and is wearing familiar, trendy Londoner uniform – all-in-black with plain ankle boots – clothes that give nothing away but draw attention to her face, to her extraordinary hazel eyes and elegant eyebrows that look like bold brushstrokes. 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. And I find no greater pleasure than when I see an artist who I’ve admired all my life, doing their best work as their most recent work.

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

I wonder how she accounts for the contrast between the extroversion of performance and the privacy of the page? 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. All artists are explorers, but she ventures into uncharted territory, beyond the foothills of the imagination. The rhyming narrative is not autobiographical yet the poems centre on nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles growing up in Dorset – as she did herself. Poetry needs to create an entire world on the page without musical accompaniment, through form, rhyme, metre and tone.Definitely one to go back to (probably more than once) and I'm sure that more will be revealed with each read. Despite being a fan of her music for years something about her writing feels as if you are reading straight from a philosopher themselves.

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying Album Review | Pitchfork PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying Album Review | Pitchfork

Imagine the show Over the Garden Wall, except rated R due to sexual abuse, sheep-fucking, drunk deadbeat dads, and a sexy dead Elvis. 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.If all this sounds a little abstruse, the language is even more so, since it's all written in Dorset dialect. Scattered amongst the roots of timeless Gore Woods are Safeway carrier bags, 1970’s confectionery brands, used condoms. 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. Mixed in with the harsh realities is the supernatural, the ghost of a soldier who inhabits the woods, folklore and proverbs passed down through the generations – never eat a blackberry past September apparently. There’s something of Dead Papa Toothwort from Max Porter’s Lanny here, a rapturous, unsettling spirit of the green.

Picador acquires Orlam, a narrative poem by PJ Harvey Picador acquires Orlam, a narrative poem by PJ Harvey

Philip Gwyn Jones, Picador Publisher, comments: “It is an absolute privilege and pleasure for us to be publishing the entirely remarkableOrlamon the Picador Poetry list. Cropped locks and corn dollies hang from trees, raw meat is a remedy for warts and ash sap is a tonic for newborn babies. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poemsequence 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. I was very interested in that blurring of reality and fiction, imagination and inventing things or actually using real sources.The setting is a benighted woodland village in Dorset, ‘veiled in vog’ and ‘rank with seepings’, where nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives in time with the rhythms of the year: sheep shearing, school terms, and the mysterious habits of her family and neighbours.