Silk Trail

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Here is a fascinating counterpoint to E.J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike. Silk Trail is Andrew Suknaski’s broken narrative poem that moves from east to west, from China across the Pacific, and eastward on the CPR. Those used to seeing Canadian history presented in the traditional manner will find their perspectives altered dramatically by this account, which traces like a fine silk thread the history of the “coolies” who worked on the CPR in the late nineteenth century to help transport from the Pacific to the Atlantic the most precious and perishable of commodities, the Chinese silkworm: “‘sorry... your majesty / in this country / everyone waits / for the silk train / everyone....’”

Suknaski renames and redefines the familiar throughout this poem, which is not so much an epic as it is a collection of narrative fragments organized around the “silk thread” metaphor and owing much to Ezra Pound’s experiments in the ideogrammatic method. At its best the poetry is unsurpassed in its gracefulness:

only weave it

into something

we might walk

we were always

by a mountain

Such gracefulness is not always sustained over the poem’s 93 pages, but there are enough surprises to make Silk Trail a powerful, and overdue, account of this chapter in Canada’s history.