Orlam

P.J. Harvey
Picador Poetry

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 tells of a year in the life of Ira-Abel Rawles and her home of Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem.  In the nearby Gore Woods Ira meets her own personal deity, the bleeding ghost of a soldier callled Wyman-Elvis, and finds sanctuary in her own ritual world.

Written in Harvey's native Dorset dialect - crucially with each poem also presented alongside it's modern English translation - this is a bold and bedevilling journey through a deliciously dark melange of the magical logic of chidhood and its associated rituals along with the often dark realities of growing up, of life on the cusp of adulthood, all fed through the filter of an early post-modern  1970s rural childhood where the familiar, the exotic, the profane and the perverse all come together into a dark and delirious masterpiece of rural horror.

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