Orlam

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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’).

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

One of my favorite songs of yours, “Nina in Ecstasy,” didn’t make the cut with the demo albums because it’s a B-side, but you used to play it at concerts. I saw you perform it as your final encore in Denver shortly after 9/11, and it was very emotional. What’s the story behind that song? 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. I really hope it does develop in something,” she adds. “I would be so happy if someone wanted to turn it into a film or theatre play or something like that, because I think it does lend itself to something, visually, so strongly. I see a whole world being created out of it. I don’t have plans to at this stage but I’d be so open to that. Hopefully in my lifetime.” 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: Whatever the technical merit, whatever the story telling, whoever the author is, the most important feeling at the close of a piece of writing is grief – grief at leaving the company of the characters, grief at the sudden absence of the narrator’s voice, grief at the end of the protagonist’s challenge to our own settled pleasant valley Sunday view of the world.

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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: 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? 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.’

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

She does not finish the sentence but it leads me to ask about her image. What is it like to make her peace with middle age – having been such a siren? “It’s hard. It’s a process of acceptance. In your late 40s, you realise you have to start letting go of the way you used to be, the way your body used to be, the way your face used to look. It’s a humbling experience. But you need to embrace it. And I have to say I’m enjoying getting older – for the letting go. When you’re young, you worry so much about appearance and what people will think. You’re full of anxiety but, as you get older, you can let go of that and it is incredibly freeing.” She sounds content. And she starts to talk about a future dream in which, one day, she will live on a Dorset smallholding again – and will come full circle.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. The characters: the birth of Irla and Abel and their naming are muscular; dark; deep folk poetry. She’s bard-like, storyteller - but doesn’t always deliver poetry Still in use would be words like “t’other,” for “the other” and “b’aint”; instead of saying, “he isn’t” or “it isn’t,” you’d go, “b’aint.” Meaning that “it ain’t”— it “be ain’t”— if you see what I’m mean. Yeah. It’s wonderful to hear you mention Flannery O’Connor, because in my teens, my late teens, that canon of work had a huge effect on me. And the way of storytelling, the narration, and I’m sure, like I was saying earlier, those things you absorb, they come out at a later date. Full-time Students, Under 26’s, visitors with disability or impairment (one carer get free entrance), people in receipt of Pension Credit, Universal Credit, Income Support or Job Seekers allowance.