Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) lived in a variety of locales not always of her own choosing, just running along the edges of different places, "looking for something." Descriptions of places, imagined or real, pervade her writings, and the very titles of her collections signify the importance she attributes to those places. With the obsessive attention to detail that she frequently identifies with her own craft, Bishop writes place poems and stories, tracing the connection between geographical places, her history, travels and childhood memories. Her place poems repeatedly speak to geographical displacement and her biographical background while suggesting a complex interweaving of space and time. She avoids interpretation in favor of description that bears the traces of her past that never entirely disappears or resurfaces. Shoreline topography is an important emblem for her imaginative release which could survive the past. Thus her poetics of place not only provides descriptions of the world, based on facts gathered from apparently unpromising experiences, but also offers awakenings leading to a new knowledge of life.