Knit One, Haiku Too: A Book Review

I love this little book and I’m not a knitter. I knit but how can someone who's spent more than two years trying to knit one hat -- call themselves a knitter? I do love knitters and knitted things. I'm also not a poet but I enjoy reading them and there are several very proficient haiku Gatherers and poets. But you don't have to love haiku to ejoy this little book.

Its author, Maria Fire, is more than a knitting poet with a gift for haiku,  she is also a wonderful teller of stories. The yarns that compose this gem of a book come in a rainbow of narrative hues. Stories from her past—of the old woman who taught her to knit, of friends who knit their way through sadness, of children and men who learned to knit. There are gleanings from other writers’ stories about characters who knit, and of course, there is haiku. “Kitting with spirits/shedding again and again, what you think you know.” One haiku for each narrative on a separate page of its own with the image of yarn or knitting needles to purl the two together.

In one of my favorite stories in this book, “Stitches that Danced,” Fire tells of the time she took her young boys to see the movie White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. On the way out of the theater afterwards the boys “threw their hand up over their heads and sprang into the air. They left me behind, vaulting like Baryshnikov all the way to our small Toyota.” Afterwards Zach, her eight-year-old signed up for a program of modern dance for children --  a “summer in the park” offering. For the recital, he wore the flowing and golden-flecked silk scarf that she had knitted for him. “As he danced with his friends, the scarf fluttered behind him,” Fire writes. “He told me he felt like a magician making gold in the air.” Is this not an enchanting idea --  young boy who thinks of himself as a magician dancing gold in the air?

Fire knits more than gold into this exquisite little book -- she has knitted blessing.into it too.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune named Beryl as a "Best of 2006 Minnesota Authors." Her book The Scent of God  was a “Notable” Book Sense selection for April 2006 and has been nominated by booksellers for a Midwest Booksellers Book Award.