Naked Eye Publishing

10/05/2024

A Friday double header at Filey Literature Festival!

08/05/2024

This Friday - don't miss it...

A Friday double header at Filey Literature Festival!

15/02/2024

Of Innocence and Aggression “I could have begun this by saying it was an accident. Self-defense. […] But it’s the […]

01/02/2024

Meet February's Translator of the Month: Wendy H. Gabrielsen! 👏

Originally from London, Wendy moved to Oslo after completing an MA in translation in 1987, and was lucky enough to translate her first two Norwegian books just two years later. After getting “sidetracked” teaching English for a couple of decades, she resigned from the French School in Oslo in 2020 and has since returned to translating and copy editing full time.

Read her interview here:
https://norla.info/February24

See also the interview in Norwegian: https://norla.info/februar24

Weatherglass Books | Naked Eye Publishing

20/12/2023

We will be gifting some FREE books to customers who buy books from us this Saturday. We open at 10am and we'll keep giving them away until we run out! (We will be closed on Christmas Eve.)

18/12/2023

and I want to remember this, all of this, because it happened. This last line from “To be continued” highlights two important qualities in Cooper’s poetry: it is observational, and much concerned with everyday life. What he is so anxious to recall is the woman and child who sat in front of him...

20/11/2023

17/11/2023

Do read the excellent review by Rona Fitzgerald (https://www.facebook.com/rona.fitzgerald.3) in the Winter 2023 edition of The High Window The High Window of Bob Cooper's (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100014744882260) latest poetry collection 'Listening, listening'.

https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/reviews/ %20Cooper

"I HIGHLY RECOMMEND BOB COOPER’S POEMS IN THIS FINE BOOK ABOUT LISTENING, SEEING AND HEARING."

"The poems are grounded – that is they are about place and the people who inhabit those places."

"I really warmed to Bob’s poems, his writing is skilled and empathic. His learning is worn lightly. As other commentators have remarked there are no frills. Cooper allows poems to speak for folk, and to speak to us, the reader."

"There is daring here."

"The poems read like reports. They are full of poignant, tragic even surreal accounts of everyday lives. There are so many poems to read, full of energy, of details and of sadness."

"the detail is acute and striking."

"The poems have many layers. They can echo many of the current situations in Europe and beyond. It touches on all the things we don’t want to see such as death, violence and decisions that hurt many lives. I highly recommend Bob Cooper’s poems in this fine book about listening, seeing and hearing."

'Listening, listening' is available worldwide in bookshops and online. You can also buy it from Blackwells with free postage here:
https://bit.ly/BobCooper

Rona's recent poetry pamphlet 'Aftermath:Poems of Repair and Renewal' was published in September 2023

30/10/2023

"BOB COOPER PERFORMS POETRY MORE THAN WELL AND WOULD ENHANCE AND ENTRANCE A POETRY EVENING."
John Gorman
The Scaffold and Tiswas

The first launch event for 'Listening, listening' a new poetry collection by Bob Cooper (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100014744882260) is at Linghams Books (https://www.facebook.com/linghamsbooks/) this Thursday at 7.00 prompt.

All welcome.

Do come.

About 'Listening, listening':

"Bob Cooper’s new book continues his exploration of the long, carefully-worked line, which blends thoughtfulness and distinctive utterance in a distinctive and instantly recognisable manner, somewhere between Whitman and Simon Armitage. Like Whitman, that line is put to the work of internalising the experience of others, and this book contains imaginary multitudes, from Borges and Brueghel to a favourite gang of the Romantic poets, the Famous Five re-imagined as ‘Willie Long-Legs’, ‘Little Johnny K’ The poets are always set in the contemporary moment, post-Brexit, labouring under the burdens of austerity, eyeing our callous and self-serving, self-styled ‘betters’ neatly reimagined here in the figure of ‘Boris Falstaff’. Like Armitage, he has a compassionate eye for our behaviours under pressure, and the book is full of encounters and bearings of witness, statements of a nation in distress and seeking a supportive ear. It amounts to an eloquent rethreading of the power of the imagination through a unjust system, ravelling up the damage done, doing justice to that in us which persists in hope and in reaching out to each other in humankindness."

Bill Herbert
Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing at Newcastle University

"Bob Cooper with Listen, listen turns the ordinary world into an extraordinary book.
Bob Cooper has a deep-power of observation and writes more than just poems. What is captivating is that as well as being wonderfully word-worthy each poem tells a close-your-eyes and run-the-poem through-your-mind story."

John Gorman
The Scaffold and Tiswas

25/10/2023

'Listening, listening', third full poetry collection by Bob Cooper is available tomorrow, 26th October.

If poetry is about voice, it is also about listening. Teeside-born Bob Cooper listens to ordinary people and expresses what he overhears in his now famous style. In a new theme, some of Cooper’s lyrical cameos of ordinary lives feature surreal encounters with historical literary figures. True to form, these latest poems are ironic while also poignant, funny yet significant, and with much underlying comment on our times.

Bob Cooper’s third volume of poems is his crowning achievement in a five-decade career which has also seen the publication of six pamphlets, five of which were competition-winners. His poetry has been heard on radio and at numerous festivals and poetry venues UK-wide.

"Bob Cooper's new collection is set in the contemporary moment, post-Brexit, labouring under the burdens of austerity, eyeing our callous and self-serving, self-styled ‘betters’, neatly reimagined here in the figure of ‘Boris Falstaff’. Like Armitage, Cooper has a compassionate eye for our behaviours under pressure, and these poems are full of encounters and bearings of witness, statements of a nation in distress and seeking a supportive ear."
Bill Herbert
Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing at Newcastle University

"turns the ordinary world into an extraordinary book... captivating"
John Gorman
The Scaffold, Tiswas

Your local bookshop should be able to order the book within a few days. In Settle we recommend Limestone Books (https://limestonebooks.co.uk/).

We usually recommend Blackwell’s for online purchases as they provide free delivery worldwide and we have an affiliate programme with them. However for technical reasons Listening, Listening is not yet available there.

In the meantime it can be purchased from Amazon UK here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Listening-listening-Bob-Cooper/dp/191098129X/

In the US it is available from Barnes and Noble here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/listening-listening-bob-cooper/1144203140

In Australia it is available from Booktopia here: https://www.booktopia.com.au/listening-listening-bob-cooper/book/9781910981290.html

09/10/2023

John Gorman (The Scaffold, Tiswas) wrote of Bob Cooper's new poetry collection 'Listening, listening':

"Bob Cooper – with 'Listening, listening' – turns the ordinary world into an extraordinary book.
"Bob Cooper has a deep-power of observation – and writes more than just poems. What is captivating is that – as well as being wonderfully word-worthy – each poem tells a close-your-eyes and run-the-poem through-your-mind story."

Bob Cooper's third full poetry collection 'Listening, listening' will be published on 26th October.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100014744882260

03/10/2023

Listen.

Are you listening?

Bob Cooper's new poetry collection 'Listening, listening' is released soon!


https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100014744882260

"A writer who calls a spade a spade and knows how to dig with it..."
Maura Dooley

Picture by
Eddy Aigbe
https://www.facebook.com/edos.aigbe

14/08/2023

Do read an an excellent review in .is.the.ORB by of DANGEROUS CAPRICES by Nora Iuga (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100039986899738) translated by and .manole.507

"These are modern poems full of bold images"

"Iuga shines with her Dangerous Caprices"

16/07/2023

I seem to be going on a bit of a poetry binge at the moment, but I suppose that’s what you get when you follow your reading whims! Last week, I shared my thoughts on a beautiful book from Ren…

22/05/2023

Starts 7.30pm | Tickets £6 | Zoom £3.50 | Warehouse Join us for exciting...

14/03/2023

Thank you The Bobsphere] for your excellent Wordpress book review (https://thebobsphere.wordpress.com/2023/03/14/gerd-kvanvig-wendy-h-gabrielsen-translator-the-day-that-didnt-happen-2000-english-translation-2022/) of 'The Day that didn't happen' by Gerd Kvanvig translated from Norwegian by Wendy H Gabielsen.
"The day that didn't happen is structured like a mystery but one where time and chronology is messed up. Like a shattered mirror it's up to the reader to put those shards together.
Once everything is solved what you get is a powerful story about love and trust - or ways to overstep those boundaries. Recommended."
The Bobsphere]

27/02/2023

DANGEROUS

poems that ‘burn and slash their way out into the open with their searing language’ - Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman

'Dangerous Caprices' Romanian poetry by Nora Iuga
Translated by Adam J Sorkin and Diana Manole
Available worldwide in bookshops and online
https://tidd.ly/3XAPyk2

When you read her work, you immediately find yourself in the wake of some fictional characters, you are surprised to discover that you are like them, swallowed by them, or that, without noticing, these tumults become familiar to you; you carry them with you, in other words, you feel good! —Herta Müller


The poetics of opposites — this can be brilliantly applied to Nora Iuga’s poetic approach. This is an expression as carnal as it is original: “in the open suitcase, which I want to hide, my s*x can be seen, yellow and soft as a camel's snout.” —Jan Wagner, Georg Büchner Award winner

The sensuality of Nora Iuga’s texts, of a violent intensity, is reminiscent of the Proverbs of Hell by William Blake. Here is an example: “I listen to the moonlight sonata / and hammer a nail into my palm / to feel what Jesus felt / to make beauty disappear from my ears / and return thousandfold into my flesh.” —Mircea Cărtărescu

Insightful, erotic, morbid, funny and poignant as usual are the traits of Nora's poems... I just loved reading each one of them… —Paul B. Roth, The Bitter Oleander Press

26/01/2023

'Dangerous Caprices'
poetry by Nora Iuga Nora Iuga
translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Diana Manole Diana Manole

'The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer'
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nora Iuga created her title from this half-remembered quotation.
Already at the age of 67 when Iuga brought out this collection, her typical subject-matter of love and sensuality and relationships had extended to include leave-taking and death - as well as language itself. Writing has a redemptive effect, and is sometimes the only way out of despair: her 'ballpoint pen is equal to god'.
This collection encompasses elements of surreality, captivating the reader with unexpected imagery. There is wistfulness, too, but Iuga is never bitter, and an undertone of irony is ever-present.
Nora Iuga is one of Romania’s most important, productive and original writers and translators. Her poetry in Romanian is accessible; exuberantly life-filled; sensual; s*xual.
To date, Iuga has published several novels and fifteen collections of poems including the award-winning Opinii despre durere, ‘Opinions on pain’ (1980). Nora Iuga is also an acclaimed translator of over thirty books by German-language authors. In her long life she has accrued multiple awards in Germany as well as in her homeland where she has achieved national treasure status – Romania’s Grande Dame of literature.
'IInsightful, erotic, morbid, funny and poignant as usual...'
Paul B. Roth, The Bitter Oleander Press
'The poetics of opposites […] – as carnal as it is original'
Jan Wagner, Georg Büchner Award winner
'...sensuality of a violent intensity [...] reminiscent of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell'
Mircea Cărtărescu

16/11/2022

Free poetry event next week from the lovely people at Naked Eye Publishing Do pop along if you can.

16/11/2022

POETRY EVENT

We are organising a poetry event at Settle Community Library on Thursday 24th November at 11.00 am. This is to launch a new poetry collection by Sarah Littlefeather Demick.

Sarah is an Ojibwa Indian who was born in Canada but raised in the UK by adopted English parents. As a woman of Native American heritage she has grown up deeply valuing our bond with nature. The spirituality of her heritage is evident in her poems.

Sarah is a freelance respite carer. She works mostly with people who have dementia, working alone. The powerful and revealing poems in this new collection are mainly born of Sarah’s work. They illustrate her feelings about the people and situations she encounters every day, usually in social isolation or confinement.

She lives on a farm in Cumbria.

In this event Sarah will read a selection of her poems and there will be opportunity for discussion.

Everyone is very welcome at this event which promises to be very enjoyable.

If you are not able to come to the event, 'Being The One' is available here: https://tidd.ly/3VoyEod
with free postage worldwide, as well as from bookshops and other online bookstores.

18/10/2022

'Being The One'
poetry by Sarah Littlefeather Demick
(https://www.facebook.com/sarahandroddemick)
is released on Tuesday 15th November.

As well as being a poet, Sarah Littlefeather Demick is a freelance respite carer. She works mostly with people who have dementia, working alone. The powerful and revealing poems in this collection are mainly born of Sarah’s work. They illustrate her feelings about the people and situations she encounters every day, usually in social isolation or confinement. Others reflect the reality of the person who provides that care, the reality, emotions and experiences of that person seen as the ‘carer’ who is also a poet.

Sarah Littlefeather Demick is an Ojibwa Indian who was born in Canada but raised in the UK by adopted English parents. She lives on a farm in Cumbria.

https://tidd.ly/3VoyEod

22/08/2022

"Passionate, painful, witty, loving, long-sighted"

'The social decline of the oystercatcher', Sue Vickerman 's second poetry collection has been revised and reissued this week.

Sue Vickerman’s eerily prophetic poems describe Nature and the old normal before flood and famine, wildfires and too-close war. Scottish landscapes, seabirds and fresh air provide the setting for innocuous pre-pandemic behaviours: beach-combing, bird-watching, bickering. But the breeze blowing through this volume carries a prescient whiff of decay – an uncanny foretelling of what has come to pass.
The natural world is shifting, changing, not ‘normal’ at all. Everywhere there are portents: the rotting stomach of the boat dragged from the lake; the disused nests that bring down the tree; the oystercatcher’s social decline – it seems even seabirds are in retreat ‘from the encroaching edge of the sea’.
Nowadays all are aware that Nature is the treasure we are losing. These poems from the turn of the millenium are full of foreboding – but who among us did not see the writing on the wall?

This new edition of the second of Sue Vickerman’s five poetry volumes has been revised for current times.

"A breathless, breathtaking collection, nature au naturel: poetry refracted in the prism of her beacon eye, as effortless as a fulmar’s flight… Birds given tongue and tangy taste… This riotous palette of colourful, heartfelt, sharply poignant, piercingly topical experience [is] a glorious achievement."
the late Magnus Magnusson

"…poems [that] remind those of us who write only in lists how much we need rhythm in our lives… A reminder of what really matters in this hectic world."
Sandi Toksvig

"This is passionate, laconic poetry of a distinguished kind. Vickerman is best at the very exact landscape poetry which suggests, and sometimes defines, the emotions with which it is associated ... The bird poems need reading and re-reading; the empathy is acute, but don’t let that put you off – these poems aren’t really about birds. And yet they are. Painful, witty, loving, long-sighted – I seem to be running out of adjectives. And no wonder."
the late U.A. Fanthorpe"

09/08/2022

For WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH here are the titles that we publish. As well as being translations of women writers - they are all also excellently translated by women.

They are:

THE DAY THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN by Gerd Kanvig (https://www.facebook.com/gerd.kvanvig), translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (https://www.facebook.com/wendy.harrison.771)
“A beautiful, almost stylised text about a terrible secret, survival and love one late summer in a 12-year-old girl’s life.”
https://t.co/uocr8L7kw5

THE DAY NINA SIMONE STOPPED SINGING by Darina Al Joundi (https://www.facebook.com/darinaaljoundi), translated by Helen Vassello
“a powerful story of civil war, s*xual oppression, and unbreakable human spirit”
https://t.co/vCpLnB0DBs

YOU’RE NOT DYING by Kathrin Schmidt translated by Christina Les
German Book Prize winning novel about a woman's recovery from an aneurysm and her reassessment of her life.
https://t.co/fjndsI6eZy

MARSEILLAISE MY WAY by Darina Al Joundi (https://www.facebook.com/darinaaljoundi), translated by Helen Vassello
“A stunning manifesto for freedom”
https://t.co/zlIxbe2fdn

IT’S OVER. DON’T GO THERE. Short stories by Kathrin Schmidt translated by Sue Vickerman (https://www.facebook.com/sue.vickerman.1)
“powerful, bitter, tender, and as always, a humour that bites”
https://t.co/i0nZrADKOI

08/07/2022

“deep inside the banality of everyday existence a black orchid was being carefully digested” The day that didn’t happen, by Gerd Kvanvig (translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen), is a …

30/06/2022

'THE DAY THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN' by Gerd Kvanvig (https://www.facebook.com/gerd.kvanvig) is published

!!!TODAY!!!

The excellent translation by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (https://www.facebook.com/wendy.harrison.771) is supported by NORLA

Available worldwide, online and from bookstores

19/06/2022

“We are so pleased to be featured as one of the at for together with and ”

28/05/2022

THE DAY THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN
a novel by Gerd Kvanvig
Translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen
‘A beautiful, almost stylised text about a terrible secret, survival and love one late summer in a 12-year-old girl’s life.’

A small Norwegian town in August 1975. A heatwave. A 12-year-old girl, who is no longer a child. An incident that no one must know about. A dark secret – and an extraordinary love story.
As an adult, and apparently for the first time, Margrete shares the terrible truth of what happened when she was assaulted at a fairground in her childhood. Having grown up alone with a distant mother, she movingly describes the close bond she had with her grandfather and the one other person that truly saw her – a policeman who moves in across the hall. While providing the love she craves in the form of cocoa and company, Erling instinctively understands Margrete’s anguish.

How she comes to terms with the incident becomes the focus of Margrete’s reflections as she dwells not only on events and relationships, but also on the interplay of heat, light, smells and seasons. Margrete’s fragmented and haunting narrative is ultimately a powerful story of survival and acceptance – both of herself and her mother’s love.

Gerd Kvanvig was born in 1965 and grew up in Jessheim, near Oslo. Having decided her future lay in writing rather than ballet, she made her literary debut in 1994 with a poetry collection called Persona. As well as being an author, Gerd Kvanvig teaches Norwegian at Jessheim Upper Secondary School. She now lives in Oslo.

Reviews:
'The Day that Didn’t Happen is a poetic, evocative text … Beautiful images are modified and repeated. ...in which grief and song are identical, in which style and language and structure combine so decisively to create meaning. I don’t think I have entered a young girl’s mind and experienced the dangers so intensely since I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras.' Professor Hans H. Skei in Aftenposten
'...intelligent and wise. The novel is written with empathy, and the writing is sensitive and atmospheric.' Kjersti Borgen Reisop in Romerikes Blad

21/04/2022

AVAILABLE NOW online and in bookshops - worldwide

MARSEILLAISE MY WAY
a monologue by

Translated by
"A stunning manifesto for freedom" Zybeline

"I dream of a day when… all women will be proud to be women"
Noun, the heroine of 'The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing', has left Lebanon to make a life for herself in Paris. 'Marseillaise My Way' follows Noun's adventures as she flees her home country and arrives in France, a place she believes to be the most secular country in the world, only to find her freedom threatened there too by soul-destroying red tape and the reality of cultural segregation. After having survived civil war, drug addiction, violent assaults, and enforced incarceration in a mental asylum, Noun embarks on a new struggle: to obtain French citizenship. To the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, which she has learnt by heart for her citizenship test, Noun pursues her quest for a new life, calling into question the secular foundations of her new home and paying homage to women freedom fighters from across the Arab world.

"A bittersweet tragi-comedy" La Théâtrothèque
"A beautiful piece, necessary for our times, our politics and our humanity" Inferno magazine.
"Anyone who remembers The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing will make a date with Marseillaise My Way" Le Monde