The Whole Singing Ocean - by Jessica Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 âEcole en bateau, a French countercultural boat school. A story in fragments, built around the true story of a boy's encounter with a whale during his time at the school onboard a boat. âEcole en bateau was based on the ideals of 1968, but also on twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault and an abolition of the separation between adults and children. The narrative begins with a boat builder (who as a boy attended âEcole en bateau himself) and a whale, 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 documenting 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."--

Book Synopsis

From child abuse to environmental defilement, Moore's narrative poem brings to the surface transgressions from the darkest depths.

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.

Review Quotes

"Moore skillfully weaves the intrigue and beauty of the natural world ("Seeing a whale was a fathomless want," the speaker admits) with the true and often startling story of this boat school....These poems swirl together like plastic refuse in the ocean, where a whale is said to rise "like an arpeggio from the dark." Readers will find this a fascinating and occasionally uneasy collection that captures the friction in beauty and transgressions." --Publishers Weekly

"The Whole Singing Ocean is a narrative poem of immensities rising from the deep: whales, microplastics, acoustic smog, grief, rapture, abuse. This book does the deep and winding work, the honest and sometimes horrifying, always courageous work of healing." --Erin Robinsong, poet & artist

"Lush, clear-eyed and insightful...a luminous poem." --Eleanor Wachtel, writer & broadcaster