The Whole Singing Ocean

by Jessica Moore

The Whole Singing Ocean is a poetic narrative that circles around the central story of a boy and a whale, and the 2013 investigation into the École en bateau, a French countercultural “boat school,” or school at sea, which was based not only on the ideals of the sixties, but also on twisted ideas about child psychology, the theories of Foucault and an abolition of the separation between adults and children. The narrative begins with a boat builder and his encounter with a whale when he was a student of the École en bateau himself, and moves on to explore threads of philosophy, memory and various kinds of destruction, fragmentation and wholeness. The text weaves in several voices and threads of rapture and horror, as it explores adventure, childhood, abuse and environmental degradation. This work becomes a self-conscious documentation of the boat builder’s story as it unfolds, and as the narrator learns more of what happened and uncovers echoes from her own life and family history. Her discoveries cause the narrative to take some unexpected, and at times resisted, turns. Themes of memory and trauma, reliability and unreliability, binaries and magic, and the question of how to hold two very different things at once, are at the heart of this book.

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2021

About the author

JESSICA MOORE is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books 2012), is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks 2012) by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation award. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 International Man Booker. Jessica’s most recent book—The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood 2020)—blends long poem, investigation, sailor slang and ecological grief, and was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award.

Reviews

[Benoit Klam · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once story and poem; the thrill of a story dark at heart, the absolute freedom of poetry taken beyond the edge of the known literary world into uncharted territories. Territories where surprises abound, page after page, constantly rewarding the reader. My main challenge was not to read it in one go, which would have been like eating caviar as take away. Breathtaking! A marvellous (dark) jewell. A real page turner.

[Myriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved that book so much! The main story is captivating, and the other narratives are also fascinating and very deftly integrated. The style is also beautiful, very musical. I read it in two sittings because I could not put it down, but it's a book I will read more than once, to be able to appreciate fully all its nuances, that's for sure.

[Alison Gadsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although marketed as poetry, THE WHOLE SINGING OCEAN is a prosaic tale filled with fragments of memory and a heartbreaking story of abuse. It is structured with jarring shifts in language, font choice and speech that is sometimes in quotes and sometimes not. Moore's shifting language left me wondering where I was at times, but also feeling secure in the knowledge that she knows what she's doing. Also, when she refers to the person whose story she shares here, she says: "I hold his story like a child with a hot bowl of soup in two hands." So it's not hard to trust her. She is careful with this story.

And of course there is the ocean, the plastic island, the pollution, the melting arctic.
In THE WHOLE SINGING OCEAN, the ocean and the whales who inhabit it, feel like they're stuck in the confluence or conflict of human seeing, looking and maybe even seeking.

Please read this gorgeous book.

[Rebecca Slayter · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much richness of voice and thought in this work, and so much beauty… it truly does SING… Read it slowly, read it deeply.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eerie & beautiful. Language that entwines history & memory, weaving between the two.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars