Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022. That said, lovers of language, and fans of folk horror will find Orlam a rare treasure. The way Harvey works with dialect, nursery rhyme, scripture, folklore and song is alchemical. 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. A special edition with extraordinary illustrations made by the author during the period in which the book was written. It allows for some amazing descriptive flourishes as Ira takes in everything from sheep (‘sacrifices / with fleecy faces’) to a hated village boy who's described as a ‘straddle-me-face farter’ who ‘wears ewe's-muff cologne’. Many of the poems, as above, have this kind of driving rhythm to them – like twisted nursery-rhymes – and the influence of song is everywhere, with snatches of gospel lyrics, American folksong, Love Me Tender, and moments of call-and-response:

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

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. 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.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: Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields. Where do you see Orlam reflecting your own childhood in Dorset? There are lots of references to things in the Seventies. Yeah [ laughs]. I had a lot of fun writing this book. I really wanted it to be not only a book of a lot of dark and very sensitive and emotional things, but also of great humor. As you can see, I used the language to my advantage in doing that.

Dorset-born musician donates poetic work to local museum - BBC

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. PJ Harvey in A Dog Called Money, the film she made with Seamus Murphy in 2019. Photograph: Pulse Films/Allstar 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?” First five-star read of the year! I have a lot of thoughts about this that I'll try and make sense of: Although it draws a lot on my experience, and my childhood in the countryside, it’s not directly linked to that. That was just a starting point for the imagination. Like any writer, you start with a nugget of experience and then you use your imagination and it develops into something way beyond your experience.”PJ Harvey comments: ‘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 honour to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley and Carol Ann Duffy.’ 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. 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. 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.

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

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?” 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. Oh, I love that song, too. I find it very moving, and that’s precisely why we put it at the end of the set shortly after 9/11, when everything everyone did had a completely different resonance. It’s hard to remember where that song came from. It was, “I’ve got a feeling.” I sort of wanted to see the beauty and the fragility within a person under a title which implies something more like a porno movie, if that makes sense. There’s a person there and it’s fragile and it’s beautiful and it’s broken. And again, I think I was looking under the surface; I was looking under the stone.Things found in gorse woods- these picture snapshots of terror and wonderment of childhood in the woods- I like these the most

Orlam by PJ Harvey | Waterstones

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. 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.

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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. 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. 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. And so forth. It all feels like it's happening in some obscure mythic past, yet Harvey anchors it down firmly with references to Curly Wurlys, The Sound of Music, and other concrete details of a 70s/80s childhood (‘We collected bogies in a jam-jar / to melt and mould into a brain, / then rubbed our groins on the carpet / till we got that gone feeling watching Jim'll Fix It’).