Daylight evokes old loves, friendships and literary ghosts, and a lifetime in the battered landscape of this century. Elaine Feinstein has
`a sureness of rhythm and tone, a caring sentience, a knack of truthfulness, and a feeling as of Russian poets like Pasternak and Tsvetayeva for life's
freshness,' as Paul Driver wrote in the Financial Times. Hers is a `wiry, concentradedly truthful lyric of
survival' (Times Literary Supplement); `a precision without coldness' (Alice Oswald, London Magazine); `a completely singing voice' (Michele Roberts).
`These are measured, passionate poems, writes Jane Duran, `searching the essential qualities of her relationships, and bringing them into full
daylight'.
The Poetry Book Society selectors said: `Elaine Feinstein, one of the few Jewish poets of her generation working in England, continues to enrich British lyric in her own way . . . The poems in Daylight distil the store of a working life spent making Eastern Europe, its physical sediments and knowledge of the cold, at home in England . . . They are quiet, exact, stripped: toughly thoughtful meditations on loved people living and
dead.'