Orlam (Paperback)

PJ Harvey (author)

£14.99

Paperback 368 Pages
Published: 17/04/2025

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Synopsis

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. 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.

Orlam is not only a remarkable coming-of-age tale, but the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades. Orlam also reveals P J Harvey as not only one of the most talented songwriters of the age, but a gifted poet – whose formal skill, transforming eye and ear for the lyric line has produced a strange and moving poem like no other.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781529063127
Number of pages: 368
Dimensions: 197 x 153 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

A curious and enchanting thing, […] Full of exquisite nature poetry. The words themselves are a lovesome delight: soft and buzzy in mouth and ear (zummer, yoller, whiver, theasom), guttural and crude when needed (maggoty, puxy, stumble fuck). The glossary is its own poem. - The Guardian

Orlam, Harvey’s second book of poems, with Dorset and English versions on facing pages, is not the work of a dilettante but is accomplished, allusive poetry that revives the dying vocabulary of Harvey’s upbringing. […] Harvey’s otherworldly voice reaches for and occasionally touches something profound and archaic - Poetry Foundation

Ambitious, singular - The Telegraph

A rich and unwieldy epic. [...] As deliciously Polly Jean as you could muster. [...] In Orlam, Harvey is ffering new life to a dialect that has been in decline, recording folklore, wildlife and ritual through language that will not be forgotten. - The Big Issue

The heart sinks on hearing that another pop star has published a poetry collection, but PJ Harvey’s Orlam is the rare one worth reading. - The Telegraph

Onomatopoetically rich in the mysteries of nature - Louder Than War

PJ Harvey has made something beautiful in Orlam, a dialect-heavy ode to the land - Sinéad Gleeson

Bawdy, strange, intoxicating - The Edinburgh Reporter

Stunning - The Irish Times