That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. But constraint has a way of breeding creativity, and there’s no denying the indelible, almost dissociative quality that Harvey’s left-field vocal choices have given her recent albums, most memorably her 2011 autoharp-freaked antiwar masterpiece Let England Shake. The effect is like witnessing an out-of-body experience—a worshipper speaking in tongues, perhaps, or a method actor losing themselves a little too deeply in character. Her displaced voices create a sense of transportation, discovery, and, fairly often, panic.

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

The characters: the birth of Irla and Abel and their naming are muscular; dark; deep folk poetry. She’s bard-like, storyteller - but doesn’t always deliver poetry I appreciated the dirty words in the Dorset dialect in Orlam, too, like “munter,” which you wrote in a footnote meant “fugly.” I think I had to inhabit different parts of myself [for some songs]. Not all of the songs I feel able to play anymore, as much as I love them, because I feel that I’m now an older woman that couldn’t sing those words with any conviction. But “50ft Queenie” I can, because that’s a character that I can imagine and inhabit.

Orlam – Special Edition

Conjuring with imagery of her youth growing up on a farm, and of ancient West Country rituals, Orlam is written in Dorset dialect, the first book to use the language in a century. Often, the Dorset folklore had to do with farming. There’s one [piece of folklore] in the poem where, if a cow calves too early, and the calf dies, you take that calf and you put it in a maiden ash tree, a very young ash tree, facing east. And that’s supposed to stop the rest of the cattle from calving too early. Maybe it was just something to hang onto, to feel like you were protecting yourself — more in the way that some people might pray in times of need as a way of protection, or a way of feeling safer.

Orlam by P.J. Harvey | Goodreads

Dorset dialect? Well maybe. I've worked with Dorset farmers and some of it was good, but some I thought just wrong. PJ Harvey comments: “Having spent six years working onOrlamwith my friend, mentor and editor DonPaterson, 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.” Yeah. It’s wonderful to hear you mention Flannery O’Connor, because in my teens, my late teens, that canon of work had a huge effect on me. And the way of storytelling, the narration, and I’m sure, like I was saying earlier, those things you absorb, they come out at a later date. 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.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. This year has marked a number of reissues from the esteemed PJ Harvey catalog, including most recently, A Woman A Man Walked By, the second collaborative album by PJ Harvey and John Parish, that was reissued this past July.