It Doesn’t Feel Dark to Me’: PJ Harvey on Her Surreal New Novel, Growing Older, and the Beauty of Ugliness 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. 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.” det här var ljuvt på många sätt. fin skitig poesi på engelska mystiska landsbygden. skriven på dorset-dialekt och med översättning bredvid!

Orlam – PJ Harvey Orlam – PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, replacing it with whatever high trills, strained cries, and utterly unlikely expressions she can squeeze from her upper register. During the recording sessions for I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first album in seven years, she committed to stretching her voice even further beyond its apparent limits, employing longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood to overrule her any time she sang in what she now calls “my PJ Harvey voice.”

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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. 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)?

PJ Harvey interview: People think I live in a cave and eat PJ Harvey interview: People think I live in a cave and eat

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. All of which may possibly have been the case in an isolated village in 1970s Dorset, but if so, I needed much better poetry to carry me through. 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 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. 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.

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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.

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

A special edition with extraordinary illustrations made by the author during the period in which the book was written. Elaine C Smith: As a woman, you are not supposed to be a star at my age… but turning 65 isn’t what it was. When I was young, it was granny time 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.

The book has a character named Wyman-Elvis who sings “Love Me Tender.” What does Elvis Presley mean to you? I can’t say that I followed the story well. The synopsis at the beginning of each month/chapter proved very necessary. Also, the weirdness of it, with the eye of the dead sheep being the narrator and the ghost of the dead soldier being, at least partially, Elvis. 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. 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? And of course the theme. Grim! A 9 year-old girl with a drunk father, an older brother who leaves her for an imaginary friend, a mother? I'm not sure, but I think she killed herself before the story started. An sex obsession with all of them, including the 9 year-old.

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

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 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.

The Hollow of the Hand

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.