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? 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 - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey Orlam - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey

Enjoy the convenience of having The Sunday Post delivered as a digital ePaper straight to your smartphone, tablet or computer. 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. 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.”

At a live Q&A with Frank Skinner, the musician shared her knowledge of Dorset folklore and read from her new narrative poem Orlam. After a long six-year creation process, PJ Harveyhas announced that her new narrative poetry book Orlam will be released in 2022. 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 humor,” reads the book’s official description. “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.” From X Files to X Factor: Sci-fi star David Duchovny on returning to his ancestral Scottish homeland and his long-awaited romcom debut 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.

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

Things found in gorse woods- these picture snapshots of terror and wonderment of childhood in the woods- I like these the most 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.’That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. But constraint has a way of breeding creativity, and there’s no denying the indelible, almost dissociative quality that Harvey’s left-field vocal choices have given her recent albums, most memorably her 2011 autoharp-freaked antiwar masterpiece Let England Shake. The effect is like witnessing an out-of-body experience—a worshipper speaking in tongues, perhaps, or a method actor losing themselves a little too deeply in character. Her displaced voices create a sense of transportation, discovery, and, fairly often, panic. 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.

Orlam by PJ Harvey | Waterstones

Orlam is an accomplished poem, a fusing of faerie with the threat of the real-world horrors such as Dogwell’s house, the place where the babysat children of Underwhelem pray ‘the dread door does not open.’ The story is told through the eyes of Ira, a young girl on the cusp of adolescence, a young ‘gurrel’ full of rage, curiosity, and longing. The yearning for completeness, for an absent half, is present throughout the book – an absent mother, a brother who prefers the company of his imaginary twin to his sister, Stacy Gales’ unborn twin, Ira’s longing for Wyman Elvis. Far from the pastoral madding crowds of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, PJ Harvey contours an altogether more gritty and at times ominous exposé of rustic traditions, woven through a tableau of natural world simplicities and charms.PJ Harvey in A Dog Called Money, the film she made with Seamus Murphy in 2019. Photograph: Pulse Films/Allstar 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. Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. I think I had to inhabit different parts of myself [for some songs]. Not all of the songs I feel able to play anymore, as much as I love them, because I feel that I’m now an older woman that couldn’t sing those words with any conviction. But “50ft Queenie” I can, because that’s a character that I can imagine and inhabit.