Orlam

Gapmouth a’scraping and ghost moth a’flappin’
Brushing my face with his thear-re-al satin
Numb in a zweemy-dance on woozy wings
These are a few of my favourite things

“To be sung to the tune of ‘My Favourite Things,’” PJ Harvey’s poem of the same name uses the language of Dorset, England—gapmouth = nightjar, thear-re-al = ethereal, zweemy = swimmy—to portray a place and way of life important to the author, a singer and songwriter who grew up on a farm there. Orlam, Harvey’s second book of poems, with Dorset and English versions on facing pages, is not the work of a dilettante but is accomplished, allusive poetry that revives the dying vocabulary of Harvey’s upbringing. Musically astute and darkly humored, the book is most memorable for its visceral depictions of farming life, like these lines about the castration of lambs:

I heave a sigh, and wipe my eye, 
And squeeze the elastrator;
I feed their little balls through 
Rubber bands with shaking fingers.

While Orlam is divided into chapters following the months of a year, each with a précis summarizing the imaginative storyline—the title character is the oracular, amputated eye of a lamb who acts as guardian of a nine-year-old girl coming of age in the village of Underwhelem—the poems work less as coherent narrative than as a series of lyrical vignettes, sometimes set in the 1970s, sometimes timeless or ancient, that create a pastoral scene out of folk superstition, children’s ditties, Christian lamb imagery, Elvis’s “Love Me Tender,” and poetry, from Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf to Geoffrey Hill. Harvey’s otherworldly voice reaches for and occasionally touches something profound and archaic, as in “Prayer at the Gate” (soonere = ghost, drisk = mist, holway = lost lane, teake = reach):

Elms unveiled in secret places
a thousand soonere-children’s faces

and drisk enshrouded in its cloak
holway, river, brook and oak,

and all souls under Orlam’s reign
made passage for the born again.

So look before and look behind
at life and death all innertwined

and teake towards your dark-haired Lord
forever bleeding with The Word.