Ellen Peirson-Hagger at The New Statesman:
Opening her late-summer set in Gunnersbury Park, west London, PJ Harvey sang: “Wyman, am I worthy?/Speak your wordle to me.” A pink haze had settled across the sky just before she appeared onstage to the sound of birdsong, church bells, and electronic fuzz. In the lyric – which comes from “Prayer at the Gate”, the opening track of her most recent record I Inside the Old Year Dying – Harvey sings in the dialect of her native Dorset. Wyman-Elvis is a Christ-like figure, literally an all-wise warrior, who appears throughout the album, and “wordle” is the world. For the next hour and a half, as the sky darkens and Harvey and her four-piece band perform underneath a low, red-tinged moon, they conjure their own wordle, one of riddles and disquieting enchantment.
Harvey is singing from the perspective of nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, the fictional character whose story she tells in Orlam, her second collection of poetry, which was published in 2022. She developed the book under the mentorship of the Scottish poet and two-time TS Eliot Prize winner Don Paterson, and learned the dialect (which she remembers hearing as a child from the older people in her Dorset village) by studying William Barnes’s 1886 A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect.
more here.
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