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. O wildest, wildest wood / of goodness and not good” – Gore Woods are where Harvey creates her most vivid poetry. Here Ira meets the ghost of a Christ-like wounded soldier, Wyman-Elvis, who becomes a symbol of faith and salvation (his name and his message, Love Me Tender , are no coincidence). The woods are also the home of Orlam, the oracle of Underwhelem, a spirit manifested from the eyeball of Ira’s beloved lamb, planted high in an elm tree. There’s something of Dead Papa Toothwort from Max Porter’s Lanny here, a rapturous, unsettling spirit of the green.

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 lot of the knowledge about lambs in the book is firsthand. Very often lambs die, whether they’ve been born with a weakness or were cade lambs, and one of the first things that happens is that the rooks [scavenger birds] will come and take the easiest part to take, which would be an eyeball. I’m sure it’s very tasty. So that is how you would find the lambs often, already half eaten. Growing up on a farm, and I think for any child that grows up in those surroundings, you learn about the life and death cycle very early on. I think that actually was a wonderful knowledge to have at that early age, and readies you for all sorts of things that happen in later life.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.” 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. 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?”

PJ Harvey on ‘Orlam,’ Elvis, ‘Rid of Me’ and Her New Album

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. Conjuring with imagery of her youth growing up on a farm, and of ancient West Country rituals, Orlam is written in Dorset dialect, the first book to use the language in a century. 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. 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. PJ HARVEY. If anyone's going to pull off something as creative and ambitious as this, it's her. I haven't read any of her books before but I adore her music and this format of story-through-poems really works with her style. 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

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.

PJ Harvey Announces New Narrative Poetry Book ‘Orlam’ Out PJ Harvey Announces New Narrative Poetry Book ‘Orlam’ Out

Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022. 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. 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. If there were cade lambs — a cade lamb is an orphan lamb — you would then hand-rear them. If it was that situation, it was difficult to not become attached to them. Although we try not to because ultimately a farm is a working business, and at some point those lambs, when they’re older, are going to have to go for meat.

Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. 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? Don encouraged me to be as bold with poetry as I am in songwriting, and that was something I really remembered him giving me, because I think I was a timid poet,” she says. “I felt, ‘Oh, I’m not worthy. I’m not a poet’ and I didn’t approach it with the same bold confidence that I do with song. Dorset dialect? Well maybe. I've worked with Dorset farmers and some of it was good, but some I thought just wrong. From X Files to X Factor: Sci-fi star David Duchovny on returning to his ancestral Scottish homeland and his long-awaited romcom debut

Orlam by PJ Harvey | Waterstones

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.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. While Orlam is divided into chapters following the months of a year, each with a précis summarizing the imaginative storyline—the title character is the oracular, amputated eye of a lamb who acts as guardian of a nine-year-old girl coming of age in the village of Underwhelem—the poems work less as coherent narrative than as a series of lyrical vignettes, sometimes set in the 1970s, sometimes timeless or ancient, that create a pastoral scene out of folk superstition, children’s ditties, Christian lamb imagery, Elvis’s “Love Me Tender,” and poetry, from Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf to Geoffrey Hill. Harvey’s otherworldly voice reaches for and occasionally touches something profound and archaic, as in “Prayer at the Gate” ( soonere = ghost, drisk = mist, holway = lost lane, teake = reach):