Before a Blue Sky Moon

by Weyman Chan

Before a Blue Sky Moon deals with themes of childhood, displacement, loss and redemption both spiritual and secular, the meaning of personal love, and at the same time gives us stunning and magical insights into a Chinese Canadian family.

Awards/Award Nominations

Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award

Reviews

With huge heart, Chan opens the difficult door between languages and lets us into the experience of making not only a life in the intersection of cultures, but of creating a new family from the ashes of the old: A remarkable book that lets you breathe the familiar air differently and new. ~Alberta Book Awards Jury

Sumptuous is the first word of description that comes to mind in describing the aesthetic here… The autobiographical elements … are fresh, and the speaker’s ambiguity in dealing with a mother’s death, estrangement from the father, family breakup, and keeping the children and family together through the bleak passages of life in an orphanage are deeply poignant and moving… This is an excellent first book. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review (full review)

Chan’s poems speak eloquently and precisely of homesickness, culture shock, loneliness, alienation, uncertainty, abandonment, dilemmas, difficult choices, intergenerational limbo, and the friction of two cultures colliding… Being alive is to suffer, to regret, to rejoice, to learn, and to grow. Weyman Chan is able to express all of that in a natural, uncontrived, heartfelt way. He is not ashamed to openly confess his love… Before a Blue Sky Moon pulses with the thick elixir of lifeblood, and it is a potent and transfiguring concoction indeed. ~Janice Mathie-Heck, filling Station

Chan’s book, Before a Blue Sky Moon, reveals a poet who specializes in evoking the ungraspable. ~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD (full review)

Chan Wee-Meen’s (Weyman’s) Before A Blue Sky Moon offers us a veritable food court of poetry. These poems display impeccable care and choice in their lyric naming of memory, family and place. “I want to describe their loss,” the poet confides, as he narrates flavours of a diasporic sadness where “here” is always an impossible “there”. The particularity of sentiment, recognition and language in this book is impressive in its wise and responsive attention to the self’s hungers. ~Fred Wah

Before a Blue Sky Moon tells a powerful story of family and loss. Whether Chan is writing about his own children, his beloved, the loss of his mother, the estrangement with his father and his father’s past, his lush, sensuous poetry redeems it all. There is nothing contrived here, for he writes with an immediacy, tenderness, and frankness that will move and astound you. This book confidently spans time, geography, cultures, generations and languages, and each poem brims with fresh insights. Chan’s writing is so richly filled with the sights sounds and smells of a living world that this book will leave you feeling hopeful and changed. ~Robert Hilles

Samples

Snow Poem

I want to write a poem about snow
and the naming of snow
in the word our Step Mom re-trained us to say
in Chinese—
thloot meaning snow—
as she held a piece of beef jerky out for us
to say each word of our mother tongue

in 1968 we were reclaiming
like daylight savings the tongue that would repatriate
our love for anyone who dared to marry our father
to save his four kids from the foster homes.

Dad and Step Mom talked about Heng Ha, the homeland:
Sah Vun, Thlum Gup, Bahk Sah
jeweled villages on a shepherd’s path
to stone-hedged grave markers,
each one in the shape of an inverted omega,
carved into rainy hillsides.

They never saw snow until they came to Canada

	if your eyes move with it
	the snow will hold still
	while the earth meets up with it
	never to own or to be owned

Step Mom warned us about heaven, when we were bad.
There’s a heaven, she’d tell us. “Yu-ga hin.”
She had eyelashes that seemed
the perfect altar of warmth
to die on

	snow is the one thing
	that holds still while we float free
	between lattice and rivulet
	snow is the anchor of our moderation

but snow kept her alone in the house
constantly sweeping out the grey air
yelling at us to step back
when we walked in dusted with snowflakes

and years later on the morning
my mother-in-law died
her last eyes looking out
followed that gentle whiteout
it hushed her breathing and I wondered
how anybody could stand open-mouthed
looking upward
hoping to cradle-catch that illusion of falling
into its own vowel—its no,
negation, have-not of heaven
following the s

and if snow could be a poem about the body
when in other seasons a fish
could dream air out of water
or a tree could bend sugar out of light,
then snow would talk about disbelief,
its six-sided dissolution
in the millions
proving that the smallest touch lasts

why her, why this falcon-like fall
from recovery, only to believe with
all the science of your heart that all we have
is this body
this body taken by storms and dart frogs,
excoriations that bend leaves at night
with our children’s voices crying for us

this body
caught in the middle distance
where life stops freezing or burning
and begins to know itself.

I skated on the river today
amazed that this distance could be mother to water
and that water could have made me

to remember a word like thloot
on a day like today where the sun spoke to me
like an old friend—

	Yes I remember you when you left me yesterday
	and I’ve slept without you in the world
	anticipating nothing until now.