The musician and songwriter PJ Harvey has in Orlam (Picador, £16.99; Tablet price £15.29) created a strange and beguiling coming-of-age tale in a book-length cycle of poems. Seen through the lens of a troubled child, it reads, in its rhythms and its line lengths, like a sequence of tragic songs to be sung, folk-balladry crossed with some sweetish Elizabethan lyricism. It is made all the odder and more interesting by the fact that it is also written in a Dorset dialect (the dialect faces off, page by page, against a standard English which is much paler to behold), so the ghost of William Barnes, that poet who was so proud to wear his Dorset vernacular on his sleeve, gets added to the brew.
10 August 2022, The Tablet
Speed reading: Michael Glover on summer verse
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