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.