Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006060087
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
According to Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a spirit of the dead that enters the body of a living person in order to exercise control. Adrienne Wolfert uses this idea to identify the force that causes her to speak, to write her energetic and striking poems.
Her enthusiasm is infectious. If a reader doesn't like one poem, he may be quite taken with the one that follows. I found a longish oration called, in part, "The Sermon of the Upchurch" silly and overbearing, but on either side of it are "Album" and "Ballet d'Habit," small poems of great charm.
I can say of "Songs of Dybbuk" what is almost never said about books of poetry: it is lots of fun. "Dead Serious," for example, tells about the uncle who "worked in New Jersey;/ used up his sick days,/ so he called in,/ dead." And in "Seaside Park" are three wonderful metaphors for the sea, all in a row: "a matador flinging his cape,/ a washerwoman flipping her sheets,/ a furious pony."
This sort of bright invention and breezy tone are the hallmarks of Adrienne Wolfert's poetry, a pleasure to read. - FRED CHAPPELL
Reasonable Doubt. By Philip Friedman. Donald I. Fine. $19.95.
For the Defense. By William Harrington. Donald I. Fine. $18.95.
What this country needs - more than a good 5-cent cigar - is a good crime novel about a female lawyer. It won't be long before half the lawyers in America will be women, and there is still not a good story about one of them.
But Friedman's Kassia Miller, a New York criminal-defense lawyer, is promising. She is smart, resourceful and aggressive. When her partner in court, Michael Ryan, notices that she is what he thinks of as feminine, and realizes that this is an asset for her as a trial lawyer, Kassia shows that she is also honest:
"I saw long ago there's nothing I can do about the hardships that come with being a woman, except endure them. So I decided I was entitled to take whatever advantages I could find. If people's reactions to my being a woman give me a chance to manipulate them in court, I'm happy to do it. Nobody can say they didn't ask for it."
Kassia is, though, only a supporting character in "Reasonable Doubt," the story of a murder trial of a self-indulgent widow who is accused of killing her husband by hitting him over the head with modern sculpture. Kassia would have been better than Ryan as the star; she is more efficient.
By contrast, Harrington's Cosima Bernardin is not even a person, let alone a woman, let alone an interesting lawyer. She is, like Sidney Sheldon's women in court, a middle-aged male's adolescent sex fantasy.
Both Friedman and Harrington are lawyers, but Harrington gets just about everything wrong, from mangled metaphors to minor errors about lawyers to the reality of his characters. It makes you wonder where he went to law school. - TOM SHAFFER
by CNB