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.
