IN Whitby One Nine Nine, photographer Richard Jemison and writer Chris Firth teamed up to produce an unforgettable celebration of the Yorkshire seaside town.

It was Richard's 66 photos of Whitby that first caught the eye. He managed to get beneath the skin of the town - seeing it from angles and perspectives many of us had probably never noticed. Two bikers, backs to the camera, leaning against a railing and gazing out over the harbour, contemplating eternity; a little girl darkly silhouetted against the Whitby sands.

The photos drew you in: and then Chris's poems, one for each image, deepened your appreciation, the words elaborating on and embellishing the photograph opposite. His poem Reflections, for example, perfectly captured the mood of contemplation of the two bikers in Richard's photo, somehow getting inside their heads: "How many waves to wear away the cliffs?

"How much North wind to grind away the hills?...

"How many breaths to wear us out this world?...

"It's certainty that all will come to pass."

The result was a marvellous book which ensured anybody who read it would never see Whitby in quite the same way again.

Now the pair have followed up that book with North Yorkshire One Nine Nine. They adopt the same approach - though this time a second photographer, Northallerton-based Nigel Whitfield, has been recruited to reflect the new book's broader canvas, and there are contributions from a number of guest poets' including Pat Borthwick, Pamela Morton and Dreamcatcher editor Paul Sutherland, all of whom have strong links with York.

Once again, there are some stunning photographs - 66 in this book, as in the last. And once again, they are enhanced by the words on the opposite page.

Among the more conventional - and yet nevertheless ravishingly beautiful - images is one taken by Nigel Whitfield, where a sun-bathed Dales hillside recedes into the distance, the flowing waves of its flanks etched in outline by the dry stone walls running across it.

"I love this land," begins Chris's accompanying poem, Summer Love Song. "The breathless curves of her, "The smooth horizons of her skin "The tender, melting power of delicate melding."

There are more unusual images, too: among Chris's favourites a rusting, abandoned railway carriage colourfully daubed in graffiti.

The graffiti-artist's style somehow reminded Chris of Arabic writing. In the photograph, again by Nigel Whitfield, the graffitied shapes seem to pick up on and embroider the flickering tongues of long grass that lap around the bottom of the abandoned carriages.

The image is a fusion of the urban and the rural - of nature overcoming man, or possibly the other way around. Chris picks up on the physical similarity to Arabic writing in his accompanying poem Graffiti - and also on the contrast between rural calm and urban decay.

"When I look at Arabic I see sunlight/ dancing upon calm water.

"When I look at English I see a railway line/ Running headlong into the frantic city's heart."

There is much to treasure in this book. Somehow it doesn't come together as a whole quite as well as the Whitby book. And it is a little frustrating that the captions for the photographs are tucked away together at the back of the book rather than on each page.

But anyone who loves this county in which we live will find it a joy nevertheless.