Place is a key concept in the work of Yves Bonnefoy. The "true place" is real yet ideal, specific yet transfigured, embedded in the world yet overflowing the limits of ordiinary perception: "Hic est locus patriae." Nonetheless, Bonnefoy's place is not simply location, a richly symbolic landscape with coordinates on both geographic and metaphysical maps. It is also an activity that takes place within poetry, and this active sense comes to define the way place itself is described. After the original act of knowing and naming objects before us, creating in that manner a true place, there comes a stylistic dynamism of exchange, openness and multiple awareness that structures the work as the very site of consciousness….

Place and act [in Bonnefoy] are two complementary and inextricable terms. The poetic place implies a special activity—a naming of things as they are—and the poetic activity is located...