Set in a magical realist outpost of the West Country, the singer-songwriter’s novel-in-verse delights in Dorset dialect and folklore

A novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular, Orlam is a curious and enchanting thing. Like a dark poetic almanac, it charts, month by month, a year in which its heroine, nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, leaves behind the innocence of her childhood.

Orlam takes the reader by the hand, with each poem laid out opposite its “standard” translation and an abundance of footnotes to illuminate a hoard of folklore. This doubling slows down the reader who cares to be slowed, allowing them to puzzle out the dialect words and the way they change the poems.

Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields.

Amid the sheep farms and raggedy pubs, Underwhelem is a place of violence and superstition. At every turn women, children and animals meet with danger and sexual predation. The book builds to the moment Ira is assaulted in the ominous Red Shed, an experience that propels her helter-skelter towards the end of girlhood: “Once she was a bandy rhyme / and ever free to roam, / but now she’s cold-at-supper-time / and’ll nevermore go hwome”. Sometimes nature leans in to protect the vulnerable – the ash trees become “friends to sleepwalking / unsexed Ira / Wednesday’s child / who weeps upon waking” – and sometimes it steps back.

Orlam is full of exquisite nature poetry, and Harvey captures the seasons and the flora and fauna with lyricism and care. Ira’s attention to nature makes her a beguiling narrator. Dreading her return to the misery of school, she sings to the birds for comfort: “Help me dunnick, drush or dove. / Love Me Tender. Tender Love.” Other interludes, like her tiny poems Things I Found in Gore Woods, are equally charming, a child’s record of dark treasures: “a reddick’s nest, / wind-wrecked / on a rotting leaf bed”.

“O wildest, wildest wood / of goodness and not good” – Gore Woods are where Harvey creates her most vivid poetry. Here Ira meets the ghost of a Christ-like wounded soldier, Wyman-Elvis, who becomes a symbol of faith and salvation (his name and his message, Love Me Tender, are no coincidence). The woods are also the home of Orlam, the oracle of Underwhelem, a spirit manifested from the eyeball of Ira’s beloved lamb, planted high in an elm tree. There’s something of Dead Papa Toothwort from Max Porter’s Lanny here, a rapturous, unsettling spirit of the green.

For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)?

In that wonderful word “scratching” we find all that makes Orlam such an intriguing book – Harvey’s visceral art-making, her feel for mystery, and commitment to the Dorset vernacular. Not since the poetry of William Barnes in the 19th century has the dialect been used in this sustained way. The words themselves are a lovesome delight: soft and buzzy in mouth and ear (zummer, yoller, whiver, theasom), guttural and crude when needed (maggoty, puxy, stumble fuck). The glossary is its own poem.

When vernacular writing succeeds it makes everything seem thrilling and alive, unexpectedly subversive; what the poet Tom Paulin described as “a language impatient of print, an orality which seeks to fly through its authoritarian net”. The trick is to make it fresh. At times, this falters in Orlam. The heady combination of dialect, folklore, Biblical imagery and rhyme can push the poems into archaism, making them seem runaway folksongs. Indeed songs, both old and new, bloom throughout Orlam like wildflowers and we yearn for the melodies that might have accompanied them.

Yet when Harvey brings Ira’s world back to the details of her late-70s, early-80s girlhood we feel the book spark again, catching and surprising us: Ira and her brother Kane-Jude hanging around and getting into trouble on a loose “Black Saturday”; Ira standing in Gore Woods “in the violet half-light ... by a car battery / a jerry can / the electric fence”.

Harvey worked on Orlam for six years and you can feel her passion running through it. As Ira progresses through the seasons, among the oaks and ringdoves, Harvey returns us again and again to that most moving image of her, as a child being rushed from childhood, a little “shepherd girl” full of longing in the wild West Country, “conzumed with twanketen [melancholy] / that’s only eased by scratching”.

Liz Berry’s The Republic of Motherhood is published by Chatto. Orlam is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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