Orlam

Product Information

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 – PJ Harvey Orlam – PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey in A Dog Called Money, the film she made with Seamus Murphy in 2019. Photograph: Pulse Films/Allstar 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. She does not finish the sentence but it leads me to ask about her image. What is it like to make her peace with middle age – having been such a siren? “It’s hard. It’s a process of acceptance. In your late 40s, you realise you have to start letting go of the way you used to be, the way your body used to be, the way your face used to look. It’s a humbling experience. But you need to embrace it. And I have to say I’m enjoying getting older – for the letting go. When you’re young, you worry so much about appearance and what people will think. You’re full of anxiety but, as you get older, you can let go of that and it is incredibly freeing.” She sounds content. And she starts to talk about a future dream in which, one day, she will live on a Dorset smallholding again – and will come full circle.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 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. 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 Doesn’t Feel Dark to Me’: PJ Harvey on Her Surreal New Novel, Growing Older, and the Beauty of Ugliness

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

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Full-time Students, Under 26’s, visitors with disability or impairment (one carer get free entrance), people in receipt of Pension Credit, Universal Credit, Income Support or Job Seekers allowance.

Miscellaneous

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. To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood. PJ Harvey comments: ‘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 honour to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley and Carol Ann Duffy.’ Orlam is an absorbing, singular, profound tale, set in the imaginary village of Underwhelem... Much of the writing has the rhythm of a spell – as if to stir cauldrons as well as hearts.' 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 Poetry – PJ Harvey

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? 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. 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. 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.Where do you see Orlam reflecting your own childhood in Dorset? There are lots of references to things in the Seventies. 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. 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.