Dani Netherclift's Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies

Reviewed by Kathryn MacDonald

(Assembly Press, 2026)

We’re told that the elegiac and lyrical narrative is rooted in the 1993 drowning deaths of Netherclift’s brother and father. Much of the content, particularly in the middle section, stems from the author’s research, which she calls “the creative artefact of my PhD”. This, along with images of rumpled envelopes link the author’s narrative to her grandmother’s, along with articles photocopied from newspapers of other drownings. These weave Netherclift’s experience with those of others. She probes literature, science and magical thinking, returning time and again to the day of the drownings, to memories (hers and others’), to official records, to a search for herself trapped in absence.
 
Place and the coincidence of familial experience are essential to the unfolding of the storyline. We’re given a hint of this with the first lines of the largely prose poem:

I have a collection of one-hundred-year-old
envelopes addressed to my great-grandmother,
sent from the trenches in France and Belgium
in World War I. The address the envelopes
were sent to is the place my father and brother
departed from on the day they died. This land,
Ngurai-illum Wurrung Country, forty acres,
shaped like a lopsided house turned on its
side, was colonised by my Scottish ancestors
one hundred and seventy years ago.
 
These envelopes are empty now.
 
[…]
 
… I witness my father and brother drown, minutes—perhaps only seconds—apart.

The author is witness, and also conflicted, ambiguous:

I say— Though I witnessed every moment
of their drownings,
 
but I didn’t witness every moment, only the
parts I could see.
 
I say— I saw them die,
 
but I’m sure their hearts were still beating the
last time I saw them.
 
I say— I’m sure.

Netherclift contemplates the way awareness creeps up on a person. Invoking the death of a great-uncle in New Guinea, she notes her great-grandmother’s body “had been marked / indelibly with absence”. These disparate linkages run constantly through the book. Yet, Netherclift’s skill creates a cohesive weaving, moving from example to example of the surprise of death and the wounds it leaves on the living. In example after example, there is disjuncture between what happens in the physical world and what happens to those affected. Netherclift gives us the example of Schrödinger’s cat – the 1935 experiment that highlights the unknown time in-between: 

​For a period after a person dies, the mourner’s
brain conjures an expectation to see their dead
loved one walking in through familiar doors….
[…] The absence of their presence, the
memory of their living body, swells and fills
space until those thresholds shrink, and you
come gradually to believe that they are gone.
 
A person is transformed in a moment,
they lose themselves, their body becomes
something else, transforming (falling?)
from body to cadaver.
 
In the absence of a body, the sight of a body,
how do we make these translations?

​This becomes Netherclift’s thesis question. She probes into literature, recorded cases, every nook and cranny, quoting broadly from fiction to nonfiction. Yet, with clear skill, reading never feels like reportage, but rather as if we’re taken into the author’s mind where she quests, searching for words to articulate what happens to the mourners. She ventures into traditional burial rites and asks what resolution can be found when there is no body, or if a body has been retrieved but cannot be seen. What closure?
 
As we near the end, Netherclift comes closer to articulating the conclusions she’s reaching:

​A corpse is becoming, and un-becoming
it is an in-between space,
known/unknown
body/corpse
person/thing
subject/object
flesh/meat
being/non-being
text/space
written/unwritten
rewritten.

​She struggles to articulate the place of trauma, the place and the people death leaves behind:

​Though my imagination in this matter is a
story. A page, a line. Though it might have
been awful for them. Though they might not
have been able to bring themselves to look
upon his damage at all. These words I write
cannot constitute a body. They do not lay
hands or yes upon a body.

​It is as if we’ve slipped into her unconscious along with her, struggling to understand the vessel that is no longer a body alive, no longer the loved one:

​The corpse is a punctuation. A kind of type.
A hieroglyph. If elegy forms a refusal to give
up the dead, the body is a page we begin to
transcribe.
 
But the drownings of these two men are
written upon my body. Grief will change the
composition of your cells.

Netherclift does reach a modicum of closure. Early on, she discovers a box in her mother’s shed. When the time comes that they must leave the beloved place of her great-grandmother, the place from where her bother and father left on their last day alive, her mother gives her a sorted-through box of the original’s contents. She wonders what her mother has removed as she goes through the box of her bother’s things. Within the box, there’s another box of the most favoured possessions and she experiences “reverence for the close-enough…body":

​I know,
a fingerprint
holds
so little trace.
 
Though, through DNA, so many stories can
be held in such a trace, yet we cannot hold a
fingerprint, or kiss it goodbye.

​At the end of her searching narrative, Netherclift says, “This is no act of prosopopoeia. There is only quiet.” The dead are silent. She does not give them words.
 
A blurb on the back cover says Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies is “a powerful current of words, an unmooring.” Another says, it is “Beautiful, and terribly moving.”
 
I echo these words.

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Kathryn MacDonald’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland and India. Her reviews have also been published in journals across Canada and on her website (https://kathrynmacdonald.com). Her newest poetry collection, The Blue Gate, will be published by Frontenac Press, Spring 2026. She is a co-author of Liminal Spaces (Glentula Press, 2025) and is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon (Glentula Press, 2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP, 2011), and Calla & Édourd (fiction, HBP, 2009).