[In the following review, Lindstrom praises the poetry collected in In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages, asserting that the volume presents “distinguished examples of both exile writing and what is sometimes categorized as ‘literature of human rights.’”]

The Chilean Military Regime that began with the 1973 coup and lasted through the 1980s is well known for such practices as holding citizens in undisclosed locations, subjecting them to torture, and disposing of their bodies, while withholding information from relatives. The aftereffects of those years are still being felt in Chile, where the proceedings against the former dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, have been playing out slowly. A few creative intellectuals have become determined to keep alive the memory of the years of military rule. Film director Patricio Guzman recently drew attention to this painful episode in Chilean history with his much-acclaimed documentary The Pinochet Case, which features interviews with the survivors of the military's detention centers. The writer most associated with the effort to preserve the memory of the years of military rule is Ariel Dorfman. Probably best known in the United States for his play Death and the Maiden, whose protagonist is a torture survivor, Dorfman is also a poet, novelist, literary and social critic, and a professor at Duke University. He was one of the estimated one million Chileans who went into exile in the months following the coup.

In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land is a collection of poems centered on the experiences of exile and of living in a country where citizens are being taken away and left unaccounted for. While it does contain new material, it is in considerable measure a republication of texts to which Dorfman's readers have already been exposed. Some of the texts have been in circulation for quite a while. Many of them appeared in English in Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance (1988) and before that in Pastel de choclo (1986) and other Spanish-language publications. (Duke University Press properly acknowledges the high proportion of republished texts.) Some of the poems have received further exposure by being read aloud at public events concerned with issues of human rights. This volume does not contain a great deal of material that will come as a surprise to Dorfman's English-language readers, especially since the new poems are in the same vein as those of Last Waltz in Santiago. Nevertheless, the spare, understated texts are distinguished examples of both exile writing and what is sometimes categorized as “literature of human rights.” In Case of Fire is a bilingual edition with the Spanish and corresponding English text on facing pages. The translations, jointly credited to the bilingual Dorfman and the veteran literary translator Edith Grossman, are natural-sounding and accurate.