Exile. Ann Ireland

is nothing less than a miracle.”

      The auditorium was hushed at last.

      Stan’s reading was full of pauses and crisp, short phrases evoking the lives of Colonia Milagro which, I confess, I have never visited. Why should I enter that slum? It’s filthy, overrun with thugs and rabid dogs; open sewers stream down its mud-baked streets. Drug dealers lurk in every doorway, jackets bulging with weapons.

      Stan, it seemed, had got one of these thugs to give him a guided tour of his barrio, for each poem was full of precisely observed moments. There was the child, clad in ripped shorts, who stood knee deep in the trench, washing himself, as he had been taught by his scrupulous mother, in the typhoid-infested water. The poem ended with a final image of the boy, using his finger as a toothbrush, swabbing the inside of his mouth.

      “… sores like open eyes.”

      His work received the kind of hushed respect he was clearly accustomed to. I’d met guys like him at la Luna, passing through on “fact-finding missions,” or escapees from Capitalism, with wild hair and a well-thumbed copy of the South American Handbook. They despised the word “tourist” and prided themselves on their idiomatic Spanish and their ability to engage real people in conversation. They always want to be escorted into the shantytowns, as if the wretched souls who hung on there were more real than the tax-paying citizens of the cafés.