Paul Fleischman

Masala Mala: Poems from India Paul Fleischman

This collection of poems was written within the maelstrom of India, and conveys the tastes, textures, and feel of the subcontinent. Here is the ancient, complex, and modern civilization with its heat, dust, kaleidoscope of saris, litter, packed trains, caparisoned elephants, moonlit nights, Mosques, Temples, Churches, Synagogues, and Meditation Centers, beggars, computer scientists, beaches, macaque monkeys, plastic trash, banyan trees, and the spoken musical voices of its brides, Brahmins, preachers, widows, college boys, aristocrats, radicals, professors and mothers. India has a unique power to seduce, repel, and elevate; these poems make those powers concrete - you can smell the incense, auto exhaust and chai. For a moment the great old metamorphizing giant of India is held visibly aloft in a net of word, rhythm and image.