Eva Eliav's second book of poetry shines as brightly as the sun in the summer of her title. In this luminous collection, there is an ongoing and often profound tension between apparent opposites that are in fact linked by the very essence of their existence: the normal and the unusual, the known and the unknowable, the secular and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred, music and noise. Her language is unadorned yet evocative. Janis Rapoport, author of After Paradise and Winter Flowers
While reading the fine, focused collection One Summer Day by Eva Eliav, we can imagine ourselves inside an apartment or outside in nature, observing details. While the speaker in poem 6 states that "regret has become / my most faithful companion" it is only one of many intense feelings Eliav explores. However, the overriding sentiment is wonder about creatures, people, ideas. Tender, thoughtful, true poems, full of the possibilities of one day.
Jessica Barksdale, author of When We Almost Drowned and Grim Honey
With delicacy, with grit, poet Eva Eliav leads us to feel the sharpness and pain of a poet's life. Her startlingly precise observations of the street, the world, the coffee shop touch us with a pensive melancholy and leave us with the sense that "in the end we have the love / that we can manage." In the end, too, we know that, "like starving beasts / devouring their own muscle / poems survive." These poems survive, echo in the mind and memory, long after the cover is closed.
Jerome Mandel, author of Nothing Golden Stays and Covet the Oven
One Summer Day opens with a sense of frailty and closes with a sense of ease. In between, Eliav shows us bountiful life. These spare poems are rich in images.
Norita Dittberner-Jax, author of Crossing the Waters and Now I Live Among Old Trees
If Eva Eliav were a sculptor, her creations would be small and deceptively simple, each one fashioned with the meticulous care of a Renaissance master . . . Nothing is superfluous, and surface calm masks rich emotional depths. In Eliav's world, "all of it matters," and so, too, will it matter to the fortunate reader.
Evan Fallenberg, author of The Parting Gift
