Orlam

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Things found in gorse woods- these picture snapshots of terror and wonderment of childhood in the woods- I like these the most 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. 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.” Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022. One of my favorite songs of yours, “Nina in Ecstasy,” didn’t make the cut with the demo albums because it’s a B-side, but you used to play it at concerts. I saw you perform it as your final encore in Denver shortly after 9/11, and it was very emotional. What’s the story behind that song?

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying Album Review | Pitchfork PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying Album Review | Pitchfork

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?” 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.

Orlam – Special Edition

He said, ‘no, I really did want to see some of your poems’,” adds Harvey. “and I said, ‘oh gosh yeah’. 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. Dorset dialect? Well maybe. I've worked with Dorset farmers and some of it was good, but some I thought just wrong.

PJ Harvey Poetry – PJ Harvey

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. 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?

Orlam

A special edition with extraordinary illustrations made by the author during the period in which the book was written.

Orlam – PJ Harvey Orlam – PJ Harvey

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. 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: A natural question, given PJ Harvey’s considerable musical output, is whether she intends to perform her poetry in song? She has in fact indicated ambitions to develop Orlam into a stage or film dramatisation. The stirring powers of nature, vicarious childhood misadventures and trappings of popular culture certainly make for a rich subject matter. 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.” Once or twice I'm reminded of her old beau's And the Ass Saw the Angel; the heavy dialect, the brutality of adolescence, the ensouling of the world; but this is a far more mature, controlled work, without ever losing the perspective of the child telling it.

The Hollow of the Hand

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.

Orlam - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey Orlam - Original Hardback - PJ Harvey

For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)? A beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country by musician and writer PJ Harvey.And a lot of the [characters] have two names, so it’s like a dual personality. I was very interested in that blurring of reality and fiction, imagination and inventing things or actually using real sources. It’s all mixed up. 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. 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. And it’s sort of remade and comes out of you in a new form. So I don’t really distinguish between the fact and the imagination because they’re all as real to me.