Orlam

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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. You do so much of the artistic process, whether writing or making art, alone. Do you consider yourself an introvert? Do you feel introversion has its advantages? 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: She said: “It was so interesting for me to learn the Dorset dialect and study it like one would study a foreign language and I learned it until it become part of my system. Ira-Abel Rawles gives a child’s eye view of life on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Nearby, the magic realist domain of Gore Woods transcends time and folklore prevails. Here Orlam, an all-seeing dead lamb’s eyeball and oracle of UNDERWHELEM, is Ira’s protector. Another dweller of Gore, Wyman-Elvis, a ghost warrior from the Ransham Rebellion, ricochets whispering ‘Love Me Tender’ echoes throughout the verses. Further song lyrics from bands such as Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues enter the stream of consciousness. Which, alongside peanut butter sandwiches and fizzy pop anchor Ira’s approaching adolescence in the late 20th Century zeitgeist.

Orlam by PJ Harvey - Pan Macmillan

ABOUT USLouder Than War is a music, culture and media publication headed by The Membranes & Goldblade frontman John Robb. Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net. 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. I'm tempted to go the full 5, partly because it's so good in its own right, partly because this is a side of PJH we've only glimpsed before, especially on albums like White Chalk and Dance Hall at Louse Point; the writer who draws a line from goth to actual old things, who can capture the inner life of a girl in a world where - thanks in no small part to the dialect which I'm told is broad - it's the 1970s and the 1600s and the 600s all at once, where time moves like the growth of an oak or ash tree; glacially slow, but ever-shifting. A PJ Harvey who owes as much to CS Lewis and Fairport Convention as to Howlin' Wolf and Pixies. 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. 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.Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields. A beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country by musician and writer PJ Harvey.

PJ Harvey Poetry – PJ Harvey

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. PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, replacing it with whatever high trills, strained cries, and utterly unlikely expressions she can squeeze from her upper register. During the recording sessions for I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first album in seven years, she committed to stretching her voice even further beyond its apparent limits, employing longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood to overrule her any time she sang in what she now calls “my PJ Harvey voice.” 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.

She says: “I’m speaking as a 52-year-old woman. It’s hard for me to put myself in the position of a nine-year-old today.