Look for a Field to Land: Poems

This first volume of poetry to be published by Bridge Works is also Preston's first book. Both strengths and weaknesses are apparent in it. On the positive side, Preston is able to write with an appealingly indolent--and playful--sense of reverie, whether her subject is the past, the South, a climate or a season, or a very specific locale (``Along Route 41''). Her lines are long, loose, occasionally rather cummings- and Williams-like, flowing with an ease and a loopy humor that relax and gentle a reader. But there is slackness in the work, too, and it may be the slackness of a literary voice that is partly oral in motive and manner. The oral can refresh, but needs shaping and direction. Some of Preston's poems wander on too much; some of the language, intentionally vernacular, is vague, and not vivid; and sometimes her wit falls prey to gimmick. But the writer's sense of first-person fallibility in narrators can merge in an interesting way with her soft, free cadences. (Aug.)