Vessel

"Is not the corpse itself the elegy for the body that preceded it?" asks Dani Netherclift in this threnody for her father and brother, who drowned in an irrigation channel in north-east Victoria more than 30 years ago. Although Netherclift witnessed it, her memory of what happened was shattered by shock and disbelief, leaving her with fragments that surface and resurface in this poetic, discontinuous narrative. The engine of this work is the incomprehensible fact that her father and brother disappeared before her eyes and yet she could not see where their bodies had gone because of the opacity of the turbulent water which sucked them to their deaths. "We are powerless to stop the dead from disappearing," she says. And yet, towards the end, she does "find" her brother again in his old diaries. In this haunting moment, he is "so vividly present that I laugh out loud, and sob and giggle". Sydney Morning Herald

Vessel accretes by fragments, gathering meaning through associative logic. A reference to research on the foetal cells of babies remaining in the mother's body for decades transitions,

for example, into Netherclift wondering whether her brother's cellular traces might also remain in the body of water where he drowned. A vignette of the author's mother kissing her

great grandmother's lips a final goodbye is juxtaposed with imagery of roadkill, and of drowned refugee bodies, in turn shifting to list the various offerings placed in her brother's

and father's caskets. In this way, Vessel moves beyond the level of personal bereavement, and into a richer meditation on loss. Adele Dumont, Mascara Literary Review