Search results for ""Author PJ Harvey""

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.

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This artist's book is a mixture of recipes and ideas embellished with illustrations and photographs. The recipes are by British artist Sue Webster (born 1966), better known as one half of an artist duo with Tim Noble; the illustrations are by both artists. The recipes came as a result of the artists' move to Folly Acres in the British countryside—an organic farm complete with vegetable garden, chickens and wild woodland. Webster had never cooked before but felt compelled to try her hand. "As I executed each idea I would … record each dish on my iPhone. Sometimes I got bored of the edible dish and would photograph the garbage in the bin … sometimes I would also sketch them out—so the book is a combination of recipes and ideas typed on an old German typewriter (until it finally exploded), drawings and crazy photographs."

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