I really enjoyed reading "The Bight" by Elizabeth Bishop. For me, the best way to describe a place to someone is to use absolutely amazing descriptive words, phrases, and metaphors.
Although, even though I feel like the entire thing COULD be an extended metaphor, Bishop doesn't really use a lot of metaphor in her poem. Mostly, she uses descriptions and words that evoke sensations of the 5 senses from the reader.
Examples of some of my favorites are "dry as matches," and "how sheer the water is."
But it's not just the adjectives that make it this way. Her repetitive use of the words "dry" is, in itself, one of the most important aspects of the poem. The words like "tense," "untidy," "pickaxes," and "chicken wire" all give the impression that the place Bishop is describing is dark and unpleasant. As she says at the end, it's "awful but cheerful."
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