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Vessel: The shape of absent bodies
A new contribution to literature that grapples with grief, death and the shape of what's left behind
Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.
In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw these loved ones again. But also, never stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.
What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, interleaving stories of what it means to lose the physical body of a person you love with a bricolage of literature, history and (vessel) translations, and the realisation that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.
Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.
In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw these loved ones again. But also, never stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.
What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, interleaving stories of what it means to lose the physical body of a person you love with a bricolage of literature, history and (vessel) translations, and the realisation that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.
- GenresNonfiction
160 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 5, 2024
4 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Dani Netherclift
3 books1 followerDr Dani Netherclift lives on unceded Taungurung Country. She is the author of Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies, out now with Upswell, and from January 2026 with Assembly Press in Canada and the US. Dani is the president of the Mansfield Readers and Writers Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 13, 2026
Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift is one of my fave nonfiction books that I read in 2025 and it just came out today. Happy pub day! From the synopsis: In 1993, when she was eighteen years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North East Victoria, Australia.
This book is like an elegy and I loved the poetic mixed media writing which includes articles, photos, envelopes and erasure. I found this a very emotional read that reflected greatly on grief. It’s a difficult subject but I loved reading this book.
Thank you to Assembly Press for my ARC!
This book is like an elegy and I loved the poetic mixed media writing which includes articles, photos, envelopes and erasure. I found this a very emotional read that reflected greatly on grief. It’s a difficult subject but I loved reading this book.
Thank you to Assembly Press for my ARC!
December 2, 2024
Highly recommend this evocative, intelligent, poignant little book. The book itself is beautifully presented with white spaces and images of 100 year old envelopes (sent to author's great-grandmother from the trenches) plus newspaper articles that together build an intricate and touching sense of time and family.
I found it a stunning account of healing and witness. When the author was 18 she witnessed the tragic drowning of her brother and father.
The collective gathering of the lyric essay (snippets and aphorisms from other texts that relate to drowning) builds an evocative sense of place and family. The teasing out of loss and the space that death makes in a family's life is so beautifully and lovingly recorded.
Written as a lyric essay all the parts circle around the central story shaping and reshaping it and allowing the reader to enter into the space of the book. I was struck by the sense I got of the author as an incredibly interesting, intelligent and empathetic person. There are many book references and sharply beautiful analyses of other texts - you'll likely want to write some of them down to look up.
It's the kind of book you want to keep on your shelf and delve into again and again. I think it would be a special book for someone healing and mourning a loved one's passing. This little book will stay with me for a long, long time.
I found it a stunning account of healing and witness. When the author was 18 she witnessed the tragic drowning of her brother and father.
The collective gathering of the lyric essay (snippets and aphorisms from other texts that relate to drowning) builds an evocative sense of place and family. The teasing out of loss and the space that death makes in a family's life is so beautifully and lovingly recorded.
Written as a lyric essay all the parts circle around the central story shaping and reshaping it and allowing the reader to enter into the space of the book. I was struck by the sense I got of the author as an incredibly interesting, intelligent and empathetic person. There are many book references and sharply beautiful analyses of other texts - you'll likely want to write some of them down to look up.
It's the kind of book you want to keep on your shelf and delve into again and again. I think it would be a special book for someone healing and mourning a loved one's passing. This little book will stay with me for a long, long time.
March 25, 2025
Vessel (Upswell 2024) by Dani Netherclift is a lyrical, poetic remembering and reimagining of the drownings of the author’s father and brother in an irrigation channel when she was 18 years old. Netherclift asserts she writes a ‘lyrical essay’ (a term I adore and intend to use, with all credit to Netherclift) but it is much more than this. This tale is a form of memoir, a form of well-researched essay, poetry of great beauty, factual reconstructions and the arranging of contrasting recollections (by different people or officials) of an event that happened almost 30 years ago. This compact, visually pleasing book includes lots of white space, wide margins, and formatting (text and font) sometimes consistent with free-form poetry and sometimes with prose. It also includes photographs of the envelopes of 100-year-old letters sent to the author’s great-grandmother from the trenches of Belgium and France, and newspaper clippings of drownings that have occurred over the years. Sometimes Netherclift remarks on these particular events, at other times they are simply there to add to the mystery and tragedy of the many ways a human body can drown, and the many different bodies of water that can claim a human.
In 1993, Netherclift went swimming with her father, brother, cousin and dog. Only she and her cousin (and the dog) returned. The bodies of her father and brother were both recovered, but a long period apart. Much of the author’s contemplation is about water and its effects on the body, and how a body recovered in a day or two will look so much different to a body submerged for weeks or months. This book is Netherclift’s attempt to reckon with her dealing of these deaths, how the trauma has shaped her over the past 30 years, how it has changed her family, and how water in all its forms has become a significant theme in her life.
In this beautiful contemplation of prose poetry, the author explores a variety of issues such as history, research, grief, media reporting, police investigations, autopsies and medical reports, song, stories, fictional tales and factual non-fiction accounts, and how memories of traumatic events can be inexact or fluid and may depend on the previous experience of the person doing the remembering.
From the ancient, preserved bog bodies of the north to the shadows (absences) left behind by the victims of Pompeii, Netherclift looks to historical absences (mostly drownings) and connects them to contemporary losses, both famous (such as Harold Holt and The Titanic) and the ordinary (which rate only a small paragraph in the local newspaper). She also contemplates the act of looking upon the face and body of someone who has died, and the closure that might give, compared to those who cannot do so because the body is never recovered, or has been so irretrievably damaged that it cannot be recognised, or because they have chosen (or been instructed) not to look. This becomes a recurring theme in the book: the absence of bodies, and whether the act of seeing them somehow transforms their loss into something other.
This is a book for poets, for those struggling with loss, or for those interested in the meditation on bodies, space and water and the intersection of words and memory, bodies and death, form and content.
In 1993, Netherclift went swimming with her father, brother, cousin and dog. Only she and her cousin (and the dog) returned. The bodies of her father and brother were both recovered, but a long period apart. Much of the author’s contemplation is about water and its effects on the body, and how a body recovered in a day or two will look so much different to a body submerged for weeks or months. This book is Netherclift’s attempt to reckon with her dealing of these deaths, how the trauma has shaped her over the past 30 years, how it has changed her family, and how water in all its forms has become a significant theme in her life.
In this beautiful contemplation of prose poetry, the author explores a variety of issues such as history, research, grief, media reporting, police investigations, autopsies and medical reports, song, stories, fictional tales and factual non-fiction accounts, and how memories of traumatic events can be inexact or fluid and may depend on the previous experience of the person doing the remembering.
From the ancient, preserved bog bodies of the north to the shadows (absences) left behind by the victims of Pompeii, Netherclift looks to historical absences (mostly drownings) and connects them to contemporary losses, both famous (such as Harold Holt and The Titanic) and the ordinary (which rate only a small paragraph in the local newspaper). She also contemplates the act of looking upon the face and body of someone who has died, and the closure that might give, compared to those who cannot do so because the body is never recovered, or has been so irretrievably damaged that it cannot be recognised, or because they have chosen (or been instructed) not to look. This becomes a recurring theme in the book: the absence of bodies, and whether the act of seeing them somehow transforms their loss into something other.
This is a book for poets, for those struggling with loss, or for those interested in the meditation on bodies, space and water and the intersection of words and memory, bodies and death, form and content.
February 16, 2025
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this little volume while bookshop browsing, but I’m really glad I found it. Vessel is a book length lyric essay that spirals around images of the body as a way to express and explore and meditate on grief and death, both in general and specifically in relation to the author’s own experience seeing her father and brother drown when she was just eighteen. I have also witnessed the death of a beloved family member, though not under the same sudden and shocking circumstances as Netherclift, and I found following along the ribbon of historical research and ekphrasis and poetry and personal reflection she’s created here was both comforting and illuminating. In the modern world we shy away from the fact of the body after someone has died; it was a rewarding experience for this reader at least to sit with it for a while.
November 11, 2024
Vessel by Dani Netherclift is an eloquent, honest and raw exploration of grief and the role writing can play in forging a path through it.
Dani examines the impact of the drownings of her father and brother that she witnessed at just eighteen years old. She never saw their bodies again.
In poetic fragments, she explains what happened, draws parallels to other cases in history and in literature where the bereaved never view their loved ones after death, and creates a body of words to commemorate her father and brother.
An incredibly gifted author, Dani’s lyric essay is a work of art to be lingered over and treasured.
Dani examines the impact of the drownings of her father and brother that she witnessed at just eighteen years old. She never saw their bodies again.
In poetic fragments, she explains what happened, draws parallels to other cases in history and in literature where the bereaved never view their loved ones after death, and creates a body of words to commemorate her father and brother.
An incredibly gifted author, Dani’s lyric essay is a work of art to be lingered over and treasured.
November 14, 2024
I read 'Vessel' by Dani Netherclift in one sitting, I could not put it down to do even mundane things such as preparing food!
Dani's story was sad and heartbreaking with the loss of her Dad and brother in 1993, profoundly intriguing and poignant but also hopeful.
I liked how Dani used both historical and more modern stories (and envelopes) of real life, death, joy and finding peace and acceptance throughout her book.
A beautifully written book, which resonated with me and, no doubt, will with many who have lost family members in sudden and tragic circumstances, unable to say goodbye.
I highly recommend reading Vessel.
Dani's story was sad and heartbreaking with the loss of her Dad and brother in 1993, profoundly intriguing and poignant but also hopeful.
I liked how Dani used both historical and more modern stories (and envelopes) of real life, death, joy and finding peace and acceptance throughout her book.
A beautifully written book, which resonated with me and, no doubt, will with many who have lost family members in sudden and tragic circumstances, unable to say goodbye.
I highly recommend reading Vessel.
November 14, 2024
When I bought this book I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was a little afraid that the words describing the tragic circumstances of the work would be too hard to read. Instead I found myself absorbed and unable to stop reading until I reached the end but it did not feel like the end. Somehow I feel that there will be more to Dani’s story. Her ability to build memories among carefully selected quotes holds the interest of the reader. Keep writing Dani.
April 19, 2025
a beautiful and neuanced reflection on love and loss across generations, and how we remember details through grief. I have read both Dani and her sisters works surrounding the death of their father and brother, each of them perfect in their own way.
August 17, 2025
This was the most beautifully evocative and heartwrenching read. I don't have enough superlatives to praise the scope, breadth, depth and lyricism of this work.
I devoured it in a day. I was not going to bed last night until I had finished.
This work of narrative non-fiction centres on the drowning deaths of Dani's father and brother in 1993 when she was 18.
It is lyrical, scientific, investigative, historical, physical and metaphysical, and the writing is something I will pore over the text time and time again because of its deftness, the way it induces goosebumps, to say what is impossible to say within the limitations of language and yet you know in your heart and gut it is truth.
To know we are palimpsests, and we write our own stories on our skin as much as the people who know us will write their story of us on our skin, is to be seen, to be known, to be misunderstood, and truly loved.
As a reader I was broken open like a book and wanted to write down who I was, to record the truth of me, only to realise the imperfection of this desire.
"To think of your own death, you must first think of yourself as a body. As nothing more." p.89
I devoured it in a day. I was not going to bed last night until I had finished.
This work of narrative non-fiction centres on the drowning deaths of Dani's father and brother in 1993 when she was 18.
It is lyrical, scientific, investigative, historical, physical and metaphysical, and the writing is something I will pore over the text time and time again because of its deftness, the way it induces goosebumps, to say what is impossible to say within the limitations of language and yet you know in your heart and gut it is truth.
To know we are palimpsests, and we write our own stories on our skin as much as the people who know us will write their story of us on our skin, is to be seen, to be known, to be misunderstood, and truly loved.
As a reader I was broken open like a book and wanted to write down who I was, to record the truth of me, only to realise the imperfection of this desire.
"To think of your own death, you must first think of yourself as a body. As nothing more." p.89
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews