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.