Critical Commentary
Now and then you read poems that remind you how irreducible and necessary poetry is. What these poems do can’t be done in prose. They evoke places that, even if you’ve never been there, feel achingly familiar, and moments that, even though they’re someone else’s memories, feel shockingly like your own. Their intimacy is haunting, their wry humor surprising. Afterwards you put the book down where you can find it again when you need it.
– Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
If you want a poetry collection that understands where Americans actually live now — emotionally, morally, geographically — Perdido is a book worth your time. M F Drummy’s poems unfold in backyards and buses, recovery rooms and desert towns, family kitchens and foreign landscapes, showing how ordinary life, attended to carefully, becomes poetry.
The title Perdido — Spanish for “lost” — is key. Not merely misplaced, perdido suggests strayed, damaged, bewildered, gone astray. Across Perdido, Drummy writes from within that condition. The poems track lost memory (“little deaths of memory” in “Bitterroot”), lost friends (“so painfully beautiful the world had to look away” in “Rapid City Ash”), lost selves (“It took years for me to resurface” in “My Many Ghosts from Canal Street”), and the slow loss of bodily confidence (“Rollator, walker, wheelchair, bed. And that is if I’m lucky.”).
What distinguishes Perdido is its tonal balance. Drummy’s voice is plainspoken, intimate, and often funny. In “I Think We Can All Agree That Puppy Mills Are a Bad Idea,” a man signs a petition “without ever once making eye contact,” recalling a fish named Brad trapped in a glass bowl — compassion and waste held in the same breath. This is Perdido’s America: well-intentioned, awkward, human.
There is grief here, but no melodrama. Travel poems set in Ecuador, Ireland, or the American West carry devotion and sorrow lightly, as lived facts. Even national trauma is approached obliquely: “Nine Eleven Twenty-Three” ends not with catastrophe but with relief — “no aircraft flying / into / b u i l d i n g s.”
Perdido doesn’t ask whether we are lost in America; it assumes we are. What it offers instead is companionship — poems that help us recognize one another while we navigate the uncertainty. For readers seeking poetry grounded in lived experience, moral attention, and quiet resilience, Perdido is compelling and rewarding poetry.
– Rafiq Kathwari, Recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.
