I wanted to ask you about the new album’s relationship to “Orlam,” the book of poetry you released last year. I think I also refer to the ewes as "shabby mothers." Again, it's kind of conjuring the actual image too. This is the other thing I learned with Don Patterson in my poetry mentorship: Every single word you use in a poem has to work really hard for you. So by saying "bedraggled angels," we think of the whiteness of the fleece, but you also think of the fleece wet and heavy. Fleece kind of gets pulled off by brambles, and they always look a bit shabby with their wool coming off of them. So you've got a lot of different images going hand in hand with the actual meaning of the words that you're using. I wanted to ask you about the lyric “Love me tender / Tender love” on “A Child’s Question, August,” and about all of the Elvis references both on the album and in the book: peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, “ Are You Lonesome Tonight,” a ghost character named Wyman-Elvis.

I read several interviews with you in which you talked about this idea of collapse, as a kind of aesthetic or action that runs through these works: the collapse of time and space, blurring of genders, of myth and reality, life and death. How do you convey this within these songs? I was thinking of "Lwonesome Tonight," which is also a poem in Orlam, and blends images of Elvis, Jesus and the natural world. How does collapse work for you as a principle in this music and in the book? Can you talk a little bit about how you've woven together each practice that you've employed to do so — writing, drawing, making music, even performing the poems as a reader — to bring this encompassing narrative to life?You’ve been in a collaborative partnership with John Parish for almost thirty years, and with Flood for almost as long. How have those relationships evolved?

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 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 humour. With [my 2011 album] Let England Shake, I was so absorbed with reading war poets — not just First World War, but across all wars — and I found the need to put very ugly things into beautiful language. Quite often poems of great beauty are describing something very violent or very ugly. This was really intriguing to me. So I wanted to try and create lyrics of great beauty to describe these terrible, terrible things that were happening, in the way that poets had done for centuries. And that was what began to really get me interested in wanting to become a better poet. 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.

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.

It sounds like you approached it with grace and patience rather than what I would have done, which is panic. Harvey, who is fifty-three, is still the only artist to win the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize twice, first in 2001 and then a decade later. It’s hard for me to think of a contemporary artist who has even dared to emulate her; much like fellow-visionaries Björk and Kate Bush, Harvey is a category of one. Our conversation has been condensed and edited. 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. One of the poems I wrote early on in my mentorship course with Don Paterson had been leaning into some of the words I'd remembered from being a child — I remembered the elders in the village using those words. And they're still used to this day in rural parts of England and Wales and Scotland. You know, there's a lot of dialects still running through people, and it's precious. I was just so fascinated in it because it still felt alive within me at some level. I sort of knew the words, but they've also got this guttural sonic quality that you sort of understand the word, even if you don't in a comprehensive way. You feel it through the sound. You understand it through the sound of the word. 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.It's almost like your voice is more a channel for all of these different selves — Polly, the characters you create — than simply "your voice." Was there a point when you realized, about your singing and your music in general, that you were able to channel all of these selves and worlds?

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. Over the past few years, you have released the demos to every album you’ve put out so far. As you went through those, was there anything that made you clench your teeth like, “Do I want to put this out there?” Once when you were asked about your penchant for dark themes, you said you have a natural inclination to look under the surface — which gave me an image of you lifting up a log and seeing all the creepy crawlies under it. From this view, darkness is truly illuminating; it's a source of growth. I wondered if it's been frustrating to you over the years when you've been pegged as a sort of goth wraith, when in fact you're someone out there poking around in the life cycle. 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.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? 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. When she hasn’t been working on poetry, she has been recording a new album, due out next summer. “I’m very pleased with it,” she says of the music. “It took a long time to write to get right, but at last I feel very happy with it.” Here, in a rare interview, Harvey explains how Orlam originated and reflects on her music career.