It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 10:56 am

All times are UTC




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 47 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4  Next
Author Message
PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2022 3:41 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Fri Sep 10, 2010 9:06 pm
Posts: 780
I guess I missed something, wich are the differences between this edition and the one in October?
Thank you


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2022 4:30 pm 
Offline

Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2022 4:48 pm
Posts: 160
Location: Italy
The october one comes with PJ's art with it.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Sun May 01, 2022 12:01 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Fri Sep 10, 2010 9:06 pm
Posts: 780
OK, so this one has no PJ's Art?
this edition is exclusivly writing with no images, is it?

why should I buy a book now if in 6months I can have a PLUS edition? I'm not getting it, sorry if I appear dumb to you


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Sun May 01, 2022 10:19 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Sat Apr 09, 2016 2:23 pm
Posts: 468
Black Hearted Love wrote:
why should I buy a book now if in 6months I can have a PLUS edition?


I assume the October illustrated edition will be a special/deluxe (=more expensive) version – just like regular paperback The Hollow of the Hand was £16.99, while the hardback 'Reader's Edition' was £45. So I guess it boils down to how much you're willing to shell out for Polly's drawings.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2022 6:01 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2016 10:18 pm
Posts: 421
She's on Front Row on Radio 4 imminently - imminently at least in my time zone!


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2022 7:04 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Sat Apr 09, 2016 2:23 pm
Posts: 468
Weirdly, the appearance was not promoted on her social media at all – she should get a tech savvy Gen Z intern to handle the digital stuff!

Anyway, here's the episode, replayable for the next month:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016xvz

I've recorded Polly's segment as an mp3, available to download for the next 7 days:
https://we.tl/t-lvPcuv5rel (ETA: fixed the date in the file)


Last edited by TheNightingale on Thu May 05, 2022 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2022 7:42 pm 
Offline

Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 pm
Posts: 130
Location: In a Suffolk Ditch
Thank you Nightingale!


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2022 7:54 pm 
Offline

Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 pm
Posts: 130
Location: In a Suffolk Ditch
I have a copy of Orlam in my hand and I am very happy. It is satisfyingly square and chunky.
Sadly it has to go back to the library in 3 weeks, but all is good for now! (I asked them to buy one so I could borrow it :grin: )

I read it last night. I really enjoyed it (I think that's the right word) and it needs to be reread lots of times. Some of the poems are quite hard work - you look across from the Dorzet to the English and then want to look across again for the idiot's guide. I suspect those will turn out to be the most satisfying.

I was very happy that Polly can create atmospheres and feeling in the poems like she does in her songs. It takes a bit more effort but is worth it. And she can still shock and surprise - you never know what will be on the next page.

In the spirit of Things I Found in Gore Woods: Things I learned from Orlam:
What a femboy is
Anus grease is a thing
Vokket is not as rude as it sounds but vuck is
The correct equipment to use when castrating lambs (she just had to go there again ...)

There seems to be a bit of a theme there but that probably says more about me than Polly!


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Tue May 10, 2022 2:49 am 
Offline
Site Admin
User avatar

Joined: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:30 am
Posts: 1901
!!

My copy arrived in the mail today, I was not expecting it so soon. It is over 300 pages long, and has an extensive glossary. I doubt that I will read it in a single evening.

I also received a set of PJ Harvey playing cards.

Random line from a random page:
"And rose from the zedgemocks to The Ultimate Elm,
As tallest talisman, magnetic moon, pansophic sphere."
Odd coincidence - These lines are from "Sonny to the Dark Wordle" and I've been playing Wordle daily for a while now. :)

_________________
Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2022 5:31 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Sat Apr 09, 2016 2:23 pm
Posts: 468
Interview with Don Paterson, Polly's friend/mentor/editor who's also the author of the standard English translation of Orlam.

*

Don Paterson on poetry, PJ Harvey and why we need to use or risk losing our local dialects

By Stevie Gallacher

It seems an unlikely, unusual double act. One of music’s most reclusive, reluctant superstars and a poetry professor from St Andrews University. But then PJ Harvey is an unusual musician and Don Paterson is not the kind of academic you meet every day.

Harvey, the only woman to have won the Mercury Prize twice, with a career studded by a series of critically acclaimed albums, has just released a book of poetry and has hailed Paterson’s guidance as an editor, mentor, and friend on Orlam, a dark and lyrical extended poem about a girl growing up on a sheep farm in Dorset, just like Harvey, or Polly to her friends.

Paterson, himself an acclaimed poet and an unprecedented double winner of the TS Eliot Prize, recognised Harvey after she turned up at one of his poetry lectures when he was teaching in London yet describes the meeting as like bumping into his pal’s cousin at the supermarket.

“Polly turned up at some classes I gave in London eight or nine years ago,” says Paterson. “I remember looking out and thinking, ‘That lassie looks familiar’ so we got talking and lo and behold it was PJ Harvey right enough. Orlam came out of conversations we were having about directions and projects she’d like to pursue as a means of furthering her own abilities as a poet.”

Orlam

Written over eight years, Orlam is a magic realist coming of age tale written in the dialect of Dorset, about a troubled girl who escapes from her pastoral life into the sanctuary of a mysterious forest through the final year of her childhood. “She has this life on a sheep farm, but also spends lots of time in the woods next to the farm, which is a far stranger place,” explains Paterson.

In Orlam, Harvey uses the Dorset dialect which for decades had lost its voice even among locals.

“It was clear Polly was pulling in the direction of writing it in her native dialect, so I encouraged her to embrace that wholeheartedly. And she did. She went and read all the works of William Barnes, the great West Country poet, and his dictionary of the Dorset dialect.

“She just swallowed it up. She ended up writing this thing which is really the first full-length book in the Dorset dialect for about 100 years.”

The book is part of a wider movement, both in poetry and beyond to celebrate local dialects.

Paterson says: “It’s now part of this general movement across the United Kingdom. We’re seeing all the different ways of celebrating dual heritage. A lot of people are writing both in standard English and their own local dialect.

“Polly is writing in Dorset dialect, but think of Harry Josephine Giles, who writes in Orcadian Scots. There’s a young guy called James Conor Patterson coming out of Newry writing in a combination of Ulster Scots and a kind of Newry argot but in a literary way. Then of course there are established writers like Kathleen Jamie who continue to write in Scots, more so than ever in a way. There’s a general movement at the moment to see other Englishes as a way of poets talking about their cultural heritage.”

Opinion differs on whether Scots, for example, can be called one language when there are so many dialects but Paterson, who is also poetry editor at Picador, believes the diversity of words and language is something to be celebrated rather than picked apart.

“It depends where you go. Some folk celebrate it. Up here I’m afraid there’s still a certain amount of Scottish cringe around the subject which is entirely predictable,” he says.

“There’s an attitude that nothing we can do is good enough for us, that pride in your own language is maybe too close to self-celebration. It’s pretty funny. Of all the things to get upset about, folk speaking our own language?”

Harvey, in her first interview in 10 years, echoed the sentiment telling The Observer last month: “Dialect is a great tool for poetry because words take on different connotations. When I’ve read the ending of a great poem, I catch my breath. In my own poems, I don’t want to tell people what to feel. I want to open the doorway so they can find out for themselves.

The acclaimed songwriter, who won the Mercury Prize in 2001 for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and again for Let England Shake 10 years later, adds: “It can be hard to know when a poem is finished. But once finished, it’s finished.

“It’s of its time and place. And I will have the desire – always – to move forward and to do something else.”

Harvey, a musician and activist who has marched to her own drum throughout her career, refusing to bend her artistic vision, was happy to listen to Paterson’s views but not necessarily accept them during the eight years spent writing Orlam.

He said: “There’s definitely plenty of resistance. But it would be very disappointing if you discovered PJ Harvey was short on opinions. She has a very clear vision of what she wants. What was impressive was the way she was able to distance herself from her work during that process that was entirely professional. Her only concern was that the words were right and in the right order. She just never took any criticism personally. Professionalism is not thinking that you and the book are one and the same. That means you can never take any criticism.

“The ability to absorb a lot of influences and then come up with something that’s entirely original, would be one of her strengths.”

Memoir

Paterson, a talented jazz guitarist, is also working on a memoir, probably called A Boyhood, about the first 20 years of his life growing up in Dundee. He expects sequels will deal with his career as a musician and award-winning author of poetry books including Nil Nil and God’s Gift To Women. At the moment, as well as his work at St Andrews University, he is working on another instalment of his decade-spanning epic poem The Alexandrian Library.

“This one ends up in the Arctic Bar in Dundee, an old whaler drinking hole, where we’re all suffering, sort of convergent apocalypse: the seas are rising, the nuclear bombs have all gone off, Artificial Intelligence has hit the singularity, there’s another pandemic. Basically there’s a lock-in at the end,” he says.

“I’ve been writing it for 30 years in instalments. I thought I was done with it a decade ago but then I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s kicking off again. Here we go again’.”

He also penned a raw and unflinching poem about the invasion of Ukraine for Prospect magazine; in which his nightmares about the invasion left him screaming in his sleep; it woke up the dogs.

When it comes to his most famous pupil, Paterson is keen to recommend the book, even to those who think they might not enjoy poetry.

“The book follows a young girl through the last year of her childhood. It’s set in Dorset but a magic realist version of the area. The woods are haunted with the dead childhoods of the other kids who have also passed through.

“You have this extraordinary magic realist stuff contrasted with life on the farm: sheep shearing, jerry cans and corrugated iron. There are honest descriptions of rural poverty, abuse and alcoholism.”

It might not be light bedtime reading but Harvey’s opus, he argues, can be widely read.

“It’s an accessible book,” he explains. “It’s in dialect but it comes with a page-to-page translation; as soon as the dialect gets hard, the shadow poem on the other side of the page gets bolder, so you can just read it in translated English any time that you want.

“But also, because it’s Polly Harvey, she works in song form a lot: there’s a lot of ballad metre, and there’s a Dorset version of My Favourite Things. It’s ribald and funny.

“As well as some hard-hitting and emotionally intense material there’s a lot of laughter to be had along the way. There’s a lot of light as well as dark in the book.”

*

Source: https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/don-paterson/


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2022 6:20 pm 
Offline

Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2019 2:18 am
Posts: 212
Great article, TheNightingale. Thanks for sharing.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Wed May 25, 2022 6:45 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Sat Apr 09, 2016 2:23 pm
Posts: 468
My copy has finally arrived! I probably won't start reading it until the weekend but just wanted to say how beautifully the hardback has been designed and put together, it feels very high-quality.


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2022 7:53 pm 
Offline

Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 pm
Posts: 130
Location: In a Suffolk Ditch
I was wondering if there was anything online that would give me any more information on the Dorset dialect and I came across The William Barnes Society page which gives you a random Dorset word or phrase over on the right hand side. I you refresh the page, it gives you another one so you can click away to your heart's content reading random words and phrases. It kept me happy for a while anyway!
https://www.williambarnessociety.org.uk/

My favourite one was "Veary loaves": Fossil sea urchins, Echinocorys. Used as a protective charm to ensure milk does not sour or the house is never short of bread.
(We all know of course from Orlam that veary is fairy)


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Tue Aug 30, 2022 7:57 pm 
Offline

Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2019 2:18 am
Posts: 212
John Parish let slip in a video interview conducted at his studio that he’s still trying to figure out how he’ll use a certain acoustic guitar—that he played on the forthcoming PJ Harvey album— when they go on tour to support the new album.

So it seems that the pronouncements of the deaths of Polly’s recording and touring careers were a bit premature. Hmmph!


Top
 Profile  
 
PostPosted: Wed Nov 23, 2022 2:56 pm 
Offline

Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 pm
Posts: 130
Location: In a Suffolk Ditch
The 20 best poetry books of 2022 to buy for Christmas:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/20-best-new-poetry-books-2022/

“mad as a bucket of frogs” :grin:


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 47 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4  Next

All times are UTC


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 67 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron