An antidote to ‘-I - my - me - itis’: Wong May’s compositional poetry

The Difficulty of Moonlight: A Wong May Special Issue. It is perhaps easy to label Wong May as a transnational poet. Born in Chongqing China in 1944 she was brought up in Singapore where she studied briefly under the guidance of American poet DJ Enright. Between 1966–68 she was resident at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She left the USA for Europe and a period of travel which included a DAAD fellowship in Berlin. Wong May moved to Dublin with her physicist husband Professor Michael Coey in 1978. As a painter she has exhibited in Dublin and Grenoble under the pseudonym Yttrium Coey, a name inspired by her husband's research in rare-earth elements. Her mother, Wang Mei-Chuang, was a classical Chinese poet who taught history and Chinese Literature.