Orlam

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Another dweller of Gore, Wyman-Elvis, a ghost warrior from the Ransham Rebellion, ricochets whispering ‘Love Me Tender’ echoes throughout the verses. The poem is beautiful, grim, provocative, with language that reflects the kindness and cruelty of nature, and a nine-year old female Beowulf whose Grendel is her own sheep-farmer sire. Harvey doesn’t flinch from the rugged aspects of farming, colourfully detailing castrations, afterbirth and a game keepers’ throbbing osser-rod. The title track, on the other hand, is hushed and vaporous, trading the other song’s stomp for the raw, lips-to-mic intimacy of ’60s folk records.

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

Nine-year-old Ira-Abel and her rural community seem to exist in a timewarp, in which signs of modernity appear alongside superstitious beliefs and practices of the past. Every chapter contains a recurring verse titled Twiddicks, which lists treasures foraged from Gore Woods.The mythology of I Inside the Old Year Dying is inscrutable even by Harvey’s standards, a nonlinear story told in a language you can’t fully understand. Well, I see my work throughout my life as all one body of work, really, I don’t differentiate between my poetry writing or my drawing or my songwriting.

Orlam by P.J. Harvey | Goodreads

When her album Let England Shake (2011) came out, the Guardian’s critic Alexis Petridis ended his review with the judgment that it might be a “creative peak” and mused, “Where she goes from here is, as ever, anyone’s guess. In many ways, Gore Woods is the central character of the book, the close-packed trees as the entry point of fear, adventure, self-discovery, death. PJ Harvey will publish a new narrative poem, Orlam, via Picador Poetry in April 2022 in the United Kingdom. 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.Photograph: Steve Gullick PJ Harvey: ‘I have to say I’m enjoying getting older – for the letting go. So I don’t really distinguish between the fact and the imagination because they’re all as real to me. As a child we often holidayed in Cor Orlam comes with a facing-page English translation, so readers can follow the richness and subtlety of the original poem with ease.

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

And all of it is overseen by the titular Orlam, who is a kind of apotheosised eyeball from a lamb Ira cared for, which died and had its eyes pecked out by crows. Written entirely in verse, it follows a year in the life of Ira-Abel Rawles as she journeys into adulthood. It goes into your being and is absorbed and swishes around and mixes with your real memories and your real experience and gets churned up.A song lyric can be a very light brushstroke because the music is supplying emotion and atmosphere, and helps the lyric come across. And in fact, I think that as a creative artist, no matter what media you work in, we sort of absorb everything one’s ever seen, felt, dreamt, read, or seen. A hardback copy of the book will be made available in April 2022 with a special collector’s edition following in October 2022. Michael Morris, associate director of the arts organisation Artangel, with whom she has also worked, goes further: “She is an artist for whom thought, feeling and a powerful sense of place merge to make singular worlds.

PJ Harvey with Max Porter – Orlam: A Conversation - Komedia PJ Harvey with Max Porter – Orlam: A Conversation - Komedia

Like you just pointed out, sometimes there seem to be references to the Seventies, which would indeed have been my childhood. The design, therefore, encourages a focus on the sonic and rhythmic intonations, whilst offering the option to make a quick flick across to standard English for the more obscure lines. Despite being a fan of her music for years something about her writing feels as if you are reading straight from a philosopher themselves.

PJ Harvey is said to be interview-shy (and this is the first she has done for 10 years) but I am struck by how conversational, curious and amused she is – with a lovely ripple of a laugh. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence.