THE HYACINTH LETTER

The Hyacinth Letter is a collection of poems about women and their relationships to the natural world and to each other. The Hyacinth Letter is organized in five parts. The poems in the first and last sequences share glimpses of the extraordinary story of a rare flower. In 1912, Norma Pfeiffer, a botany student at the University of Chicago, discovered an unknown flower in a southeastern prairie of Chicago. She collected the flower for five consecutive summers, giving it the name Thismia americana. Its closest relative is found in the tropical rain forests of Australia and New Zealand. The flower does not undergo photosynthesis and lives underground except from late July to early September when its three translucent white petals blossom slightly above the ground. Intermittent searches for the flower continue, although it has not been found since 1916.

The three inner sequences reflect on the correspondence between Rachel Carson and her closest friend, Dorothy Freeman. The story of their friendship is one of the most moving stories I know. The women shared a profound love for the natural world, literature, music, and each other. They spent summers together on Southport Island, Maine, where they both had summer homes. During the rest of the year they wrote letters to each other as part of their daily lives, sometimes writing several a day. They gave the name “apples” to their letters written in two parts—a public letter that was meant to be shared with family and friends and a private letter that was intended for reading only by the two women. Carson wrote “the hyacinth letter” to Freeman in 1954. Both referred to this letter throughout their correspondence and commemorated its anniversary each year.