Review: PJ Harvey - Orlam at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds

The only artist to have twice won the Mercury Music Prize, the Dorset-born singer-songwriter also has an Ivor Novello Award, an NME gong for Outstanding Contribution to Music and an MBE among her trophy collection. She also paints, draws and sculpts and is now a published poet, with her second book, Orlam, widely applauded since its publication in April.

Now in its second edition, with striking illustrations by the 53-year-old author, it is a 300-page narrative work in Dorset dialect that traces the “last year of childhood innocence” of nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles whose sanctuary from life on a farm in the fictitious village of Underwhelem is nearby Gore Woods, a mysterious place overseen by Orlam, an all-seeing lamb’s eyeball, where she meets Wyman-Elvis, a constantly bleeding ghostly soldier from the English Civil War.

Harvey’s lyrical gifts sing off the page during her reading of two-dozen of her poems, injecting some salty humour into the sometimes dense, gothic narrative and playing with the folk-horror in “girl-boy” Ira-Abel’s childlike perspective. The poem Drunk as a Lord’s Prayer in particular draws hearty laughter from a sold-out house, as does Duhig’s reminder that Harvey herself once observed that people imagined she “lived in a cave eating babies”.

In conversation with Duhig, she describes Orlam as “a coming-of-age story, a love story and a fable, an exploration of Dorset myth and fairy tale” that had taken her eight years to write. She explains the war theme is a continuation of her albums Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project in which she had addressed 21st century warfare, immersing herself in the work of First World War poets as she did so. After attending poetry workshops by Greta Stoddart, she joined the Lambeth Poetry School and the Faber Academy. During the making of The Hope Six Demolition Project she befriended the war photographer Seamus Murphy; the notebooks she kept on their travels to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC inspired her first poetry collection The Hollow of the Hand.

During the writing of Orlam, Harvey was mentored by the TS Eliot Prize winning poet Don Paterson, who encouraged her to push herself out of an observational style into something more instinctive. Hence her verse embraces both the Dorset dialect – which, she notes, is descended from Wessex and ancient Norse – as well as her own rural upbringing. “Growing up in the countryside, I was very rooted in the cycles of life and death living among animals,” she says.

The book also picks up on her long-held fascination with the human capacity for cruelty, which, she says, is “so much part of us”, adding: “I’m always drawn to that side of human nature as much as the kind, wonderful side. We often think of the countryside as beautiful and serene and peaceful, but there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on there.”

As well as references to Shakespeare, Orlam was strongly inspired by Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the poetry of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, William Blake and Christina Rossetti. Of Hill’s book, Harvey says: “When I read that I was in awe of it, I was shocked. I read it again and again and tried to work out what there was about it that grabbed me. It collapsed time and era.”

Harvey warms to Duhig’s suggestion that Ben Wheatley should direct a cinematic adaptation of Orlam, admitting that she always believed it had a “filmic dimension”. As for her next venture, she says she will, as ever, be guided by gut instinct. “I never make a piece of work unless I have to,” she says. “I’ve got to feel drawn and passionate to do something, it needs to be done and needs to be heard.”

All in all, a remarkable insight into one of the finest artists working in Britain today.