'Life and death is such a fine line': PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."PJ Harvey's latest album is I Inside the Old Year Dying. It's a knotty musical expansion of the world she created in Orlam, the epic poem Harvey published in 2022.
Steve Gullick/Courtesy of the artist
Polly Jean Harvey is indisputably one of the most adventurous musicians of our time. In fact, to call her simply a musician is inaccurate: She is a visual artist and a multidisciplinary performer who has worked in theater, film and video and published two books of poetry. She's released 10 studio albums under the name PJ Harvey, two with her longtime collaborator John Parish, scores for the film All About Eve and the TV show Bad Sisters and three video albums.

In 2022 Harvey published her most ambitious written work, the epic poem Orlam, written over eight years as she learned to be a poet and mastered the dialect of the English coastal county Dorset, where she grew up. She uses that almost-lost dialect throughout Orlam as she chronicles the journey out of childhood of a 9-year-old girl named Ira-Abel. Her heroine encounters ghosts and other supernatural beings — her oracle is the all-seeing eye of a dead lamb, the Orlam of the book's title — as well as humans who fail her, leading her to assume a new self. The plot matters less than Harvey's evocation of a landscape that teems with every kind of life. Part hero's journey, part almanac, part ode to a lost tongue, Orlam, like PJ Harvey's music, creates an artistic realm of its own. It runs on the rhythms of the seasons and captures the beauty, fantastical rawness and occasional horror of English rural life."