Not So Far As The Forest

Not So Far As The Forest, Griffin Candey (2018) 5'One song for soprano and celloPoetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay Not So Far As The Forest, commissioned by Detroit’s Juxtatonal (Jocelyn Zelasko and Bryan Hayslett) takes on the final and titular poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s five-poem set of the same name. These poems, rife with haunted imagery, death, and decay, paint a stark contrast to Millay’s work from only years earlier, poems that often traffic in confident, sexual, often flippant portraits of a young, openly-queer poet rising and thriving in a world that often tried to pin her down or diminish her. This shift in tone came from a tremendous loss: having spent time in France and having a brief and ill-fated romance with a French artist which left her pregnant, she retreated to rural England with her mother, with whom she was alway svery close—and while there, her mother brewed a medicinal tea, without her daughter’s knowledge or permission, that aborted Edna’s pregnancy. (T