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.
