An evocative, lyric bricolage of memoir, literature, history, and translation that wrestles with the shape death takes.
Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.
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. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn't 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, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests--elegies--inked on the skins of the dead.
About the Author :
Dani Netherclift is a poet and essayist living and writing on unceded Taungurung Country in Australia. Dani has a PhD in Creative Writing with a specialization in the elegiac lyric essay. Her shorter essays and poems have been widely published in Australia in literary journals and anthologies. She has won or been otherwise commended in multiple writing competitions.
Review :
"Lyrical and allusive, Vessel is a memoir about a personal tragedy and a moving meditation on what remains of the dead."--starred review, Foreword Reviews
"Beautiful, and terribly moving. She approaches unbearable loss with a delicate step, and walks right to its core, paying it the deepest possible respect."--Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief and Monkey Grip
"Vessel is a powerful current of words, an unmooring exploration of mortality. In its flow it carries lost bodies, fragments of conversation, snippets of philosophy and history. I am grateful for this singular book, its hunger and eloquence."--Martha Baillie, author of There Is No Blue
"In interleaving her own family's narrative with the writing of others, Vessel transcends personal elegy, and becomes something more ambitious: writing as testament; as reclamation; as communion."--Mascara Literary Review
Vessel interleaves a delicate curation of memory's traces and fragments with poetries of forgetting and remembering. Netherclift is a writer of exceptional lyrical gifts and a brilliant anatomist of memory, even when facing loss and trauma. Vessel weighs what might be held in language with what is fleeting and porous in restive, inventive and deeply moving ways.--Felicity Plunkett, author of A Kinder Sea
In a world increasingly indifferent to--or suspicious of--literature, I am supremely grateful for works like Vessel: short, intense, deeply intelligent, and profoundly moving. Dani Netherclift's account of loss, and the long process of engaging with that loss, is always compelling. Netherclift has crafted an 'elegiac lyric essay' that is both in touch with its antecedents and unlike anything I have ever read. I am left grateful for her artistry and generosity.--David McCooey, author of The Book of Falling
Utterly captivating and written with searing intelligence, Dani Netherclift's Vessel is a poetic, tender and moving meditation on grief, time, memory and love and the shapes we leave behind.--Ariane Beeston, author of Because I'm Not Myself, You See
