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1 1 2 Asbury Park PressSunday, October 2 1 1 990 Books Poetry Wall Street proves fodder (or tool play By GRETCHEN SCHMIDHAUSLER Press Correspondent People are constantly calling and saying: 'Wait until you hear She said none of her clients or colleagues seem concerned they'll end up in the pages of one of her mystery novels. In fact, just the opposite is true. "I had a broker call me and ask if he was Howie Minton (a recurring character). I laughed and said no. He seemed disappointed.

They're enjoying it as much as I am," she said. Ms. Meyers, who said she's been writing since she was a child, had no success with two previous unpublished novels, poetry and short stories. Besides a stint as a student reporter for the Asbury Park Press' School Page in 1949, she had only manged to publish one article in recent years. Despite the rejections, she said she never gave up hope.

Her husband of 27 years, Martin, an actor-writer, has been extremely supportive, she said. "I have a husband who's a nag. Every rime pays. Actually, it doesn't pay quite well enough for Annette Brafman Meyers to quit her full-time job not yet, at least. After waiting patiently for almost 50 years, Ms.

Meyers, a I The Asbury Park Press invites readers to submit original works of po-'etry for consideration in this monthly column. Selections will be made by a panel of judges whose works have been published. Please type name, address and occupation with the poem and send 'with a signed permission for publication to Poetry, Asbury Park Sunday Press, 3601 Highway 66, Box 1550, 'Jleptune, N.J. 07754. A telephone number or verification MUST be included.

Entries will be returned if accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope, foetry appears the third Sunday of each month. Letters from the Old Country Dearest, the sun shines today. -Through cold air it filters between thoughts imaged in words. 5My face is weathered and burned from searching the dark seas for your ship, ihose wooden planks, my bridge to you. When do you return? This lament scorns all others; it entraps me.

The candle lit upon the ledge melts the icy window. I smooth rivulets with one hand. Staring from light to darkness my reflection seems foreign. The face tense and pale, Strange. I will not mail this letter, you take it from my hand, or I scatter the ashes to sea.

Kelly Sparks Beach Haven and waking, say, Alas! This ground resents all intrusions but the winter wounds heal most slowly. Christmas will not be put away until Easter brings spring in small plastic pots. This ground wants sleep yet they come every day, trade flowers and tears for more of themselves to take away and leaving, gaze wistfully at the older worn stones si f'JiA former Toms River resident who now resides in Manhattan, is working on her third mystery novel and is ready to take her place on the shelf with the likes of mystery writers P.D. James, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. "Finally, at the age of 55, my first book was published.

It's a dream I've had since I was a little girl," said Ms. Meyers. The Call came just before her 53rd birthday. An acquisitions editor at Bantam Books whom she had been hounding for months to read her manuscript was on the line with the words every writer dreams of. hearing: "Darling, I loved your book." And, not only did Bantam want to publish "The Big Killing," they wanted to buy a second one.

"I hadn't even thought about a second book," said Ms. Meyers. At that point, Ms. Meyers went out and hired an agent to handle the negotiations. She takes pride in the fact that she sold her manuscript herself, however.

"Luckily, I'm a saleswoman; that's what I do best. Give me a product I trust and feel good about and I can sell it," she said. "Many writers can't do that." Ms. Meyers' first book, "The Big Killing," was published by Bantam in July 1989 and was recently reissued in paperback. "Tender Death," a sequel, was published in June and was a featured alternate for the Mysterious Book Club.

Her third book, "The Deadliest Option," is due out in the summer of 1 99 1 "The Big Killing" introduces the team of Xenia Smith and Leslie Wetzon, Wall Street headhunters whose client, a young stockbroker, is found dead in a phone booth. The naive, well-meaning Wetzon is the real heroine of the books. Both Smith and Wetzon, who are in their mid-30s, are composites of women she has known, Ms. Meyers said. "Wetzon is a little naive and very trusting.

She believes people are basically good, not evil," she said. "Smith is bitchy; her motivation is money. Their relationship is based on borderline respect for each other." She never considered that readers might not be interested in Wall Street shenanigans. "I've always been fascinated by the financial side of the world, even though I had no background in it," said Ms. Meyers.

"If they had let women into the industry when I graduated from college, I would have become a stockbroker. "I've always thought of the financial world as something mysterious, so I mi r.fl Annette Meyers' latest book, "Tender Death," was published in June. ANNETTE MEYERS time I got discouraged he'd just point me toward the typewriter again. If not for him I would have given up," Ms. Meyers said.

Ms. Meyers grew up on a 16-acre farm in Toms River, now the sight of the Dover Township police barracks across from the Bey Lea Municipal Golf Course. She and her sister were voracious readers, devouring book after book in the local library, she said. Ms. Meyers attended Douglass College, New Brunswick, on scholarship and majored in English.

Ms. Meyers recently returned from London were she was invited to be a panelist at Bouchercon, a mystery conference named for New York Times mystery reviewer Anthony Boucher. She is scheduled to speak at the Ocean County Library, Toms River, at 10 a.m. Saturday. Her topic will be "Murder and Mayhem on Wall Street." figured it would be a great landscape for a mystery.

I was right. Also, I wrote New York City into my book as a character. The energy is important." If the setting, intrigue and characters seem to have a ring of truth about them, it's not by accident or due to hours of research. Ms. Meyers is senior vice president at Michael King Associates, a Manhattan executive search and management consulting firm specializing in, you guessed it, Wall Street placements.

"Eleven years ago I was looking for a way to support my writing habit," she said. "I didn't think I'd love (my job). The schedule is very freeing. It's not a 9-to-5 job, although sometimes it's an 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

job." Because she works on commission, she's never tempted to hole up with her typewriter and neglect her steady job, she said. Although she said her advances have grown substantially with each book, she can't afford to quit her job. Besides, if she left Wall Street, where would she get her inspiration? "My 'real' job feeds my writing," she said. "It's a fertile field of information. J.

O'Kelly Belmar Montana by motorhome: On the road with Ivan Doig When the rich got richest RIDE WITH ME, MARIAH MONTANA By Ivan Doig. Atheneum. 324 pages. $18.95. I t's easy to picture what could happen here in the concluding novel of Doie's As a manifesto for fairer taxes, Phillips makes an arresting, irrefutable case.

As a blueprint for populist revolution in American politics a revolution waiting for the Democratic Party to lead it Phillips doesn't deliver. He fails to articulate the sources of public disillusionment with government in general and government spending in particular. He overlooks the extent to which nearly all politicians in Washington, Democrats included, have become beholden to monied special interests the savings and loan scandal being the most nefarious example. On a Summer's Day They told us to stay down On our knees And walk across the broken Glass strewn lot. My brother wouldn't stay down.

They whipped him, spat on him, Lashed him with the peeled branches Of a weeping willow tree. The branches were flexible And whistled like a thin shower Of scalding green rain. We stayed down. Our knees bled, But our faces, necks And shoulders were unscarred. My brother wouldn't stay down.

He bled from places we couldn't see; Stinging amoebic welts and purple tubes of blood Deep under his pale skin. I was ashamed. I stayed down. My friends stayed down And thought themselves intelligent, Sensible. My brother wouldn't stay down.

Avoiding the fierce lock Of my brother's eyes, I buried my eyes in my small chest For fear I might be Called to some awful challenge That was not in me. Because they stayed down, My friends said he was insane. I stayed down and I knew My brother wouldn't stay down All the way across the broken Glass strewn lot On a summer's day. m. Patrick Sweeney Belmar that shifting mass known as the middle class, and the complex nature of its political alienation.

Middle-class Americans may be angered by low taxes for the rich, but many also envy the rich and aspire to join their ranks tax loopholes and all. Ironically, Phillips was the architect of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," which brought Southern Democratic voters over to the Republican column and has kept them there since, in all but one presidential election. That strategy tapped into white resentment of economic, social and political gains among blacks. That undercurrent is still felt in the electorate. Look at New Jersey's tax revolt.

Among many middle-class suburban whites there's a shared sense that millions of public dollars drained from their take-home pay are wasted on urban areas and the poor who live there. Gov. Jim Florio's income tax increases hit the richest residents the hardest, and he cites "The Politics of Rich and Poor" often to defend his tax policy. But Florio and Phillips undervalue the most important sentiment among voters today: That the problem is not one of the rich being taxed too little, but of government spending too much. That leads to the second great paradox that Phillips has to take into account: How most Americans want government spending slashed, but want their favored programs spared.

Despite these and other shortcomings, "The Politics of Rich and Poor" already is a seminal achievement in modern political writing. Because of this book, it's hard to imagine any new tax policies that would further favor the wealthy but, then again, never underestimate Washington's (or Trenton's) capacity for THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR: Wealth and the American Electorate In the Reagan Aftermath By Kevin Phillips. Random House. 262 pages. $19.95.

Kevin Phillips and his book were much in the news this week as Congress and the Bush administration lined up for another overtime matchup on the federal budget, and the cry "Tax the rich!" reached a resounding pitch. With "The Politics of Rich and Poor" perched on the bestseller lists, Democratic leaders are heeding advice from Phillips, a former political analyst for the Republican Party, to tout tax fairness and put Republicans on the defensive as protectors of the wealthy. There's worth in reading this book beyond being able to cite Phillips knowingly in social and business circles. His analysis leaves little doubt that the Reagan Revolution was a massive redistribution of national wealth into the upper, upper crust. Tax policies, high interest rates, deregulation, the growth of services over manufacturing, ballooning federal, trade and consumer debt all of these features of 1 980s America made possible a new generation of parvenus and made the established rich richer, while most other Americans fell behind in terms of real wealth.

The net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans tripled during this era, Phillips notes, while the poorest one-fourth of the population suffered a net loss. The numbers and trends fit neatly enough, and the gluttonous extent to which the rich became richer is amply demonstrated in Phillips' statistics. Consider, for instance, the pay disparity between corporate executives in office suites and the workers on the shop floor In 1979, CEOs made 29 times as much income as the typical manufacturing worker. By 1988, the average American CEO got 93 times as much money as the typical prole. i I-, trilogy about the McCaskill family of Montana's Two Medicine country.

Simply take a trio of mismatched characters, load them into a motorhome with a few roadmaps and send them out to explore the back roads of Montana. Before doing this, however, assign two of them to prepare a series of illustrated newspaper feature articles somehow related to the state's centennial anniversary in 1989. The motorhome's owner and driver is Jick McCaskill, a crusty 65-year-old rancher who wants to retire now that his wife has died. Sheepherd-ing no longer provides him with a good living, and the only prospective buyer for his ranch is a big absentee agribusiness corporation called WW. Jick is loath to let WW acquire the land that has been home for several generations of McCaskills.

The expedition's lone woman is Mariah, Jick's attractive and headstrong daughter, who now is the star photographer for a Missoula newspaper. She has no interest in inheriting or occupying the ranch from which she worked hard to escape years ago. Rounding out the trio is bright but smart-alecky Riley Wright, Mariah's ex-husband, who is a columnist and feature writer for the Missoula paper. Ranch-bred Riley approaches interviews with the same abrasive tenacity that became the hallmark of such TV newsmen as Mike Wallace and Gabe Pressman, but he usually gets his story. And, like Mariah, he is not afraid to produce stories that are off-the-wall.

When the three begin their odyssey, Maria and Riley, whose divorce three years earlier left both filled with rancor, fight like the proverbial cats and dogs. Few civil words pass between them and neither neglects an opportunity to insult or denigrate the other. Although Jick finds himself playing the double role as chaperone and referee, his bias usually tilts toward his daughter because Riley never has IVAN DOIG topped his list of favorite people. He often refers to him as "Riley Wrong." As the miles roll up behind this odd trio, however, Jick begins to see that the hostility between Mariah and Riley is slowly dissipating. Day by day, they seem to be drifting closer together, and that's the last thing Jick wants.

At the same time, he realizes that he is powerless to reverse the current. Doig, now ranked among the West's best writers, offers vivid pictures of life in his native Montana, both past and present. His Montana is not the stereotyped gung-ho country of rugged, individualistic movers and shakers but of failing ranchers, withering small towns and all-but-abandoned mining centers. Through Jick, who has witnessed two-thirds of Montana's history as a state, Doig tells us of the good times and the bad, the days when a small rancher could still get by, the era when huge mining corporations and powerful ranchers ran the state as though it was their personal fiefdom. Above all, Doig brings us a powerful, moving story about people who, though creations of his own imagination, appear real and three-dimensional.

Newcomers to the fictional world he has fashioned may want to turn now to his first two McCaskill novels "English Creek" (1984) and "Dancing at the Rascal Fair" (1987). Larry Waddefl Asbyry Park Press KEVIN PHILLIPS Phillips draws interesting parallels among the Reagan-Bush era, the Gilded Age of the 1890s and the Roaring '20s: boom times for the rich followed by economic busts, and the emergence of new political forces. This time around, however, both major political parties are corrupted and ineffectual. What's missing now is a legitimate third-party movement, such as the Populists in the 1890s and the Progressives in the 1 920s. The author also gives scant attention to a great American paradox: We reject the notion of class distinctions while being acutely aware of class.

He is particularly negligent in analyzing Late Wedding Minneapolis July 21, 1990 Apple soap perfumes the air Old stone church with its oak pews, Bride and groom, bread and wine: Through stained-glass windows, Wrinkled white and blue sky. Deborah J. Turpan Oceanport GregLoomis Asbury Park Press.