Working with Absence

21 October 2025

Working with Absence

JC Niala

 

As a heritage professional whose practice is about access, one of the ongoing challenges is working with absence. People often approach heritage with expectations and sometimes even a desire to instrumentalise it, hoping that what they find in the archive will confirm ideas or values they already hold. As a poet, I was excited about learning more about the poetic associations of the English Heritage sites we were working with, but I also knew that we would encounter gaps and silences.

 

Absence is not an anomaly. It is pervasive in collections. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that silences enter historical narratives at multiple stages: the making of sources, their archiving, their interpretation, and their use (Silencing the Past, 1995). Verne Harris speaks of archives as places haunted by ‘ghosts’, where what is missing is as telling as what survives (Ghosts of the Archive, 2020). Ann Laura Stoler, too, encourages us to read ‘along the archival grain,’ attending not just to what is present, but to what is withheld or lost.

 

Poets have long grappled with these silences. Susan Howe, for instance, works directly with archival fragments—torn, erased, and marginal texts. In That This (2010), she suggests that gaps in the record are not just absences to be mourned but openings for imagination, places where new resonances can be heard. Similarly, Eavan Boland’s poetry, especially in A Woman Without a Country (2014), explores the histories of women whose voices are absent from official narratives. For Boland, absence does not only signify loss; it becomes a form of presence in its own right. An insistence that what is missing also marks what mattered.

 

Thinking about Bolsover Castle, Dr Abbi Flint and I found ourselves in such a space of silence and possibility. We used words—or the lack of them—to catapult ourselves into the lives that were and the lives that might have been. In conversation, we drew inspiration from mining songs in South Africa, imagining the possible songs, chants, or rhythms of workers chiselling away at stone—those small repeated impacts on sandstone, echoes through corridors, dust mingling with breath. We considered the chisel marks, the uneven surfaces, worn thresholds. They became more than traces: they were suggestion, rhythm, and texture.

 

One poem that came to mind was Quarry Supper by Ifor ap Glyn. In that piece, the poet reflects on a family’s history with quarry work, the slate, the rock—the land—and how the physical geography, the labour of extracting stone, shapes belonging, memory, domestic routines.  Another that stands out is The Marble Quarry by Robert Crawford, where the quarry is not just an industrial scar but also a site of memory—father and son, off-cuts, discarded blocks, shining veins in stone.  Poems like these are not perfect analogues to the histories at Bolsover, but they give texture: they show how labour in stone, in extraction, in shaping material, becomes part of what heritage holds and also what it omits. Often the ordinary lives behind the hands and people that went on to shape extraordinary places.

 

Thinking poetically about heritage means accepting that not all gaps can—or should—be ‘fixed’. Instead, they can be reframed as windows. The scratched hexafoils on a doorway, the ghostly outline of a vanished poem, as described by Abbi Flint in her blog post on Bolsover Castle, capture something of the silence where records might have been. They all prompt us to listen differently. As Howe shows us, fragments have their own force. As Boland reminds us, what is omitted can still shape what remains. Absence, then, is not the end of the story. It is an opening into new ways of understanding, and perhaps even new ways of caring for the past.

 

In practice, this might mean: allowing room in tours for ‘what we don’t know’, pausing at places where records are silent; using artistic residencies, poetry, sound-work with communities, poetry workshops with school children and young people to imaginatively ‘fill’ or dwell in absence. All the while being attentive to marks on stone or plaster, wear and tear, un-restored ruins as much as restored monuments. For me, the poetic dimension is a methodology, a way of both acknowledging absence and letting it shape what we ask of heritage.

 

Ultimately, the work of absence asks us to hold multiple temporalities at once: what existed, what is lost, what might have been, what still resonates. It asks something of the visitor, the researcher, the poet: to be present with what is not there, and to imagine responsibly. And in doing so, perhaps we discover that heritage is less about completeness than about connection, less about filling gaps and more about learning from them.

 

 

Further Reading & Poetic Inspiration

Here are texts & poems that may be especially useful if you want to explore absence, labour, stone / quarry work, and heritage more deeply:

  • Susan Howe, That This (2010) — archival poetry working with fragments, erasures, marginal texts.
  • Eavan Boland, A Woman Without a Country (2014) — exploring histories, silence, and what is not recorded.
  • Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).
  • Verne Harris, Ghosts of the Archive: Memory, Power, and the Ethics of History (2020).
  • Ann Laura Stoler, “Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense” (2008) and related essays.
  • Quarry Supper by Ifor ap Glyn — the relation of quarry work, landscape, domestic routines, and memory. 
  • The Marble Quarry by Robert Crawford — reflections of extraction, discarded stone, father-son memory. 
  • John Clare, The Lament of Swordy Well — a poem addressing an old limestone quarry / heath, enclosure, and the voices of land and people around labour and loss. 
  • Stephen Duck, The Thresher’s Labour — for a perspective on agricultural labour, rural working lives, how labour itself becomes subject (and sometimes object) of literary representation.