Orlam

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At a live Q&A with Frank Skinner, the musician shared her knowledge of Dorset folklore and read from her new narrative poem Orlam. 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. 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.”

Orlam – PJ Harvey Orlam – PJ Harvey

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. 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? PJ Harvey was born in Dorset in 1969. Her debut poetry collection,The Hollow of the Hand,was created in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy.As stated in the ‘Note on the Text’, the book is a work of the imagination. 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. 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 | Poetry Foundation Review: Orlam | Poetry Foundation

PJ Harvey in A Dog Called Money, the film she made with Seamus Murphy in 2019. Photograph: Pulse Films/Allstar Well, I loved Elvis, as a lot of children of my era did, and I still love Elvis. I love everything about him. I could lose myself in that voice, but not only that, the way he looked as well. He is almost a godlike figure in Orlam. Jason Aldean Kinda Regrets Filming 'Try That in a Small Town' Outside Courthouse Where Lynching Took Place 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.”

Do you feel a song like “50ft Queenie” differently when you perform it live now? It was a staple of your last tour. People think I live in a cave and eat children,” says PJ Harvey, her West Country burr dissolving into a giggle. Harvey was awarded an MBE for services to music as well as an Honorary Degree in Music from Goldsmiths University. She has received numerous Grammy Award nominations, has scored music for several tv, film and theatrical productions, and is the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice with her albumsStories from the City, Stories from the SeaandLet England Shake. 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:

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

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.

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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 honor to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley, and Carol Ann Duffy,” PJ Harvey shared in a statement about the book. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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. I was in my late teens, early twenties when I’d written some of those songs. At that time, it was a type of expression I needed. And things change. You get older and you don’t need to express yourself in that same way and you need to find other ways of expression.

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

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. 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. 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 Just before noon on a recent Monday, a queue stretched from the doors of Conway Hall, the central London home of the Ethical Society. The 400 or so people awaited an unusual pairing: PJ Harvey, one of our most enigmatic musicians, in conversation with Frank Skinner, one of our most familiar comedians. 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.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.