Books published by Naked Eye Publishing

This posthumous new collection of Jean Harrison''s poetry invites us to slow down and look at the world afresh. In her hands a bird becomes ''an early twentieth century hat / displayed on a stand'', buses glide like angels and silence is a lightweight fleece. There is often a wry humour at work below the surface of these poems, and always a commitment to careful, concise observations, proving she had a painter''s eye and a poet''s heart. Jean died in February 2020 having all but completed the manuscript of this now posthumous collection.  

Suki, struggling writer, still earning her keep working as a model for artists, continues her quest for literary success while battling with self-doubt and loneliness, in this second part of her autobiographical trilogy. Liaisons with dissatisfactory males have been part of life since the end of her long affair with intellectual German Ilka. Part II opens with Suki alone once again after her latest doomed fling. The ongoing failure to get her novel published is undermining her raison d'etre, and with lonely middle-age looming, Suki's soldierly determination wavers. But then, unforeseen events unfold... Part II of Suki's autobiographical trilogy.

These images offer a snapshot of a six-year collaboration between life-model and poet Suki and photographer and web-designer Bel.Suki and Bel’s multi-media project commenced with a blog discussing modelling, Art and Life. This was followed up with the weekly serialisation of Suki’s illustrated three-part biographical tale, A Small Life, Two Small Lives and True Life Nude. These online tales, illustrated by dozens of artists with whom Suki has worked, have each now been published as print editions.Two poetry collections ensued: KUNST, themed on the artist-model relationship and illustrated by sixteen artists, and Thin Bones Like Wishbones, a joint venture with poet Sue Vickerman.Video shorts based on each book in the trilogy were written and narrated by Suki and produced by Bel. Additionally this creative twosome made more than a dozen film shorts documenting life-rooms and individual artists at work around Yorkshire and beyond.Suki’s manager and minder is Sue Vickerman and Bel the photographer’s indispensable assistant is Mike Kilyon. As Suki and Bel’s ‘gofers’, Sue and Mike organised performance events, poetry readings and life-drawing sessions to celebrate different stages of the project’s development, not to mention several exhibitions of artwork created by the innumerable artists who have been inspired by Suki.This booklet has been published alongside a final celebratory exhibition in Bel’s home (in the context of the 2019 Three Peaks Arts Trail), the culmination of ‘The Suki Project’.Suki the life-model and Bel the photographer are the created personas of Sue Vickerman and Mike Kilyon.

What took place in Bradford, England in the latter half of the nineteenth century was nothing less than a sporting revolution. Kick-Off charts and analyses Bradford’s story to illustrate the importance of sport’s role in the development of the modern city. Bradford shows us how, from the burgeoning of the first industrial communities, personal and civic identities have been profoundly shaped by spectator sports - identities that remain vital to this day.

Do Christmas and all the build-up to it affect you emotionally, whether you were brought up in a Christian background or not? As Sue writes,"Advent was at one time a dour season of prayer, fasting and penitence. For me a distinct melancholy hangs over our grey rainy islands during December's darkening days. Some people just enjoy the telly and the partying, and others doubtless try to ignore the whole thing. But I think there are also those who, like me, spend the festive season running an emotional gamut. Underlying the commercial clamour there's a nostalgic sense of loss; a wistfulness - not for how it used to be in Christmases past, but for how it might have been and never really was.Adventus: the coming. These twenty-five poems reflect on Christmases past and current; on lives lived; on endings of years and of relationships; on beginnings, anxieties, hopes, and an uncertain future."Though these poems are perennials, they also serve as daily Advent readings starting from the first day of December.

The poems in Jean Stevens' latest collection range through everything from a pub on the North York Moors on a black cloaked night, an encounter with a stranger in the dead hours in Soho and jackdaws who come mob-handed, to a reflection on Elisabeth Frink's 'The Walking Madonna', an accident on black ice, a muddy quad bike, and a meeting with Beethoven in Burnley. Among poems inspired by her Yorkshire Dales home (I've fallen in love with the bones of this place ... where wind meets wind) are accounts of late love - when you've lost your hair, your waistline, your hearing, and your sweating stains the bed, and of quietly desolate loss: I thought I saw and heard you... This is a body of work with a beating heart.