Brazilians use the expression “toda vida” - for all life - where we would say, “continue to the end of the road”. On the narrow, bumpy brick roads around Petrópolis, about sixty miles outside Rio de Janeiro, you may indeed feel you will reach life’s end before you reach your destination: Sítio Alcobacinha, the long-time home of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in the outlying village of Samambaia. You have to stop every few minutes to question a resident, typically one of the ubiquitous men, shirtless and enervated by the Brazilian summer, drinking beer in the street-side cafés of this trendy, if slightly threadbare, former imperial capital. Continue down the left fork, they will tell you, “toda vida”.

Bishop didn’t quite end her days here. But certainly a crucial era of her life concluded in Samambaia in 1967, when she left Brazil after a sixteen-year stay that began as a lark, endured as a deep and difficult love affair, and ended with a death. She was to return to Brazil, more particularly to the home she bought and refurbished in Ouro Preto, another 150 miles or so due north, but she never stayed long, and visited more and more sporadically, until she finally left Brazil for good in 1974.

Bishop occupied a marginal, even ostracized, place in Brazilian society at the time, and has done since; how odd, then, the current clamour about her life here. An acclaimed play, a spicy fictionalized “biography” and an excellent set of translations of her poems into Portuguese have all appeared in Brazil in the past few years, and a major film is planned. The poet who once described herself as “the loneliest person who ever lived” is hot.

The reasons for this enthusiastic reclamation, and for the original banishment, are many. The obvious one is that Bishop wrote in English, not Portuguese. Yet perhaps two dozen of Bishop’s small output of poems are about Brazil, and she was a cheerleader for Brazilian poetry, publishing her own translations in an influential anthology in 1972. Her feelings about Brazil were perplexed, puritanical, and patronizing. (“As a country I feel it’s hopeless not in the horrible way Mexico is, but just plain lethargic, self-seeking, half-smug, half-crazy, hopeless”, she wrote in a letter.) Brazilians also resent the fact that she never took the trouble to learn Portuguese properly. (“I must take Brazil more seriously and really learn the damned language”, she moaned.) Other reasons are interwoven with the explosive history of Brazil during the period of Bishop’s stay, and with the mercurial temperament of her aristocratic lover, Carlota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained architect and civic planner universally known as Lota. Lota dabbled, however peripherally, in politics, and another cause of Bishop’s banishment was her lover’s controversial friendship (and by association Bishop’s) with Rio de Janeiro’s Governor, Carlos Lacerda, the anti-Communist politician, orator, and sometime journalist.

In 1964, a military coup overthrew the populist Marxist-leaning President, Jo“o Goulart, Lacerda’s bête noire . A military dictatorship took power, backed by right-wing politicians and the United States. Although it quickly short-circuited the ambitions of the flamboyant Lacerda, as well as those of the Macedo Soares family, Bishop and Lota were nevertheless tarred with a right-wing brush. Most agree that when it came to politics, Bishop followed Lota, when she had any opinion at all; so she found herself in the uncomfortable position of defending the anti-democratic regime to her liberal friends among the predominantly left-wing American and Brazilian intelligentsia. Meanwhile, those on the Right, many of whom considered Lacerda a vociferous parvenu, rejected Bishop. Moreover, to alienate the socially conservative, she was a lesbian.

Carmen Oliveira, the author of Flores raras e banalissimas (the Macedo Soares-Bishop story, published in English as Rare and Commonplace Flowers by Rutgers University Press last month), offers other explanations for Bishop’s isolation: the cariocas (natives of Rio) disliked her - the high-class cariocas , anyway. Lota was the darling of a prestigious circle of artists and intellectuals, and Oliveira’s book claims that they were jealous of Lota’s all-absorbing passion for an American - one whose alcoholic binges provided another cause of estrangement from others, as well as mortification to herself.

As one approaches the secluded property, leaving Petrópolis behind, one no longer needs to ask the way. It is enough to ask for directions to the home of “Dona Zuleika”. The house, designed by Lota with the Brazilian architect SÈrgio Bernardes, is an enchanting blend of nature and modern architecture. Zuleika Torrealba first visited as a guest of Bishop and Macedo Soares (a visit, alas, she doesn’t remember), and bought the property twenty years later. She has owned it for twenty-four years, and shares it with a population of sixty dogs and twenty-five servants, along with a retinue of macaws, parrots, cockatoos and a variety of wildlife she has rescued. It is a verdant paradise. The byways around it are edged with mounds of yellow lilies, agapanthus, and the yuccas known as “Our Lord’s Candles”. Nestling below an immense granite cliff, the house is surrounded by lush tropical green, maidenhair ferns, and the ever-present sound of water falling, rushing down to the sluice made for bathing in the chill mountain water. Bishop put it best: “Hidden, oh hidden / in the high fog / the house we live in, / beneath the magnetic rock / rain-, rainbow- ridden, / where blood-black/ bromelias, lichens, / owls, and the lint / of the waterfalls cling, / familiar, unbidden.”

Dona Zuleika is round and jovial, sixtysomething, and bald as an egg from chemotherapy. Rumours abound that Sítio Alcobacinha will become a literary centre. While Dona Zuleika is willing to consider offers, she insists that she must remain the house’s caretaker. Moreover, Sítio Alcobacinha would be competing for the honour with Bishop’s seventeenth-century home at Ouro Preto, a wealthy and popular city since colonial times, which now hosts an annual art festival. But when one views Bishop’s two-room study at Sítio Alcobacinha, tucked behind the main house and connected by a path, one wonders if this might not be a perfect place for a visiting writer or student, offering the seclusion and verdure that delighted her: “The ëstudio’ is about done and I am so overcome I dream about it every night . . . . I’m sure I’ll just sit in it weeping with joy for weeks and not write a line.”

Much of the current revival focuses on Bishop’s troubled and troubling life, rather than her writings (though, according to one of Brazil’s pre-eminent publishers, there is a sophisticated and passionate cult following for her poetry). It is the love story that has attracted writers and film-makers. Dona Zuleika sees it rather differently. “The main reason she stayed here was love”, she says, “not love of people or a person, but love in general.” She means the love that emerges in Bishop’s poems about Brazil - of common people, the street language, the samba, and certainly nature. “There they are, Lota! How beautiful!”, Bishop says of the approaching carnaval in Marta Góes’s one-woman play, Um porto para Elizabeth Bishop . Góes, until recently, worked as a reporter in São Paulo, but the success of this play catapulted her to the forefront of national playwrights. For thirty years, she has been a friend of the leading actress, Regina Braga, who plays Bishop. Their platonic teamwork brings to mind the more difficult partnership the play portrays. The more famous Bishop became, the less sense it made for her to be in a Brazilian backwater. The more active Lota became in civic affairs, as Lacerda appointed her to create Rio’s equivalent of Central Park, the less time she had for her beloved “Cookie”. The more Elizabeth drank, the more overwrought Lota became. Lota had a breakdown - from the stress of her civic work as well as her fraying relationship - and turned to tranquillizers. Braga and Góes discuss a final reason for Bishop’s banishment - a tragic one. Lota, rejoining Bishop in New York in 1967, took an overdose of valium the morning after her arrival.

The Macedo Soares family, who once burned Bishop’s and Lota’s letters, and forbade mention of Lota’s name en famille for years after her death, now come to the opening night of Um porto para Elizabeth Bishop . Clearly, there is a bitter irony in this history, in which two misfit women made a separate peace with each other until time and disparate destinies took its heavy toll on their work and their lives. Both are becoming symbols for causes they would not have recognized. Bishop’s poetry has now come to represent the optimistic Brazil of the 1950s and 60s - a literary equivalent, perhaps, of the World Cup triumphs in 1958 and 1962, or the “Girl from Ipanema”. Gays have adopted Bishop as a poster girl for their cause. Bishop would have been distressed to see herself included in anthologies of women poets, let alone lesbian ones. Like any poet of real talent, she wanted her work to stand on its own merits.

“There’s something cold about the Aterro - a little too disciplined”, says the poet Paulo Henriques Britto, who has translated Bishop’s poetry, prose and letters. We stroll by palm trees elegantly ordered in rows. The Aterro do Flamengo was Lota’s inspiration. The waterfront park’s modern lines and the symmetry of its landscaping set off the pale, jagged mountains and the Baía de Guanabara. “God created the world in seven days, of which two were needed just for Rio de Janeiro”, runs a Brazilian proverb. But if Lota didn’t have quite the touch of God, certainly she is now extolled as a civic visionary, and that is the image projected in Oliveira’s book (which sold out in the first month, with a second edition of 20,000 quickly following. Britto’s most successful translation, Poemas do Brasil , 1999, sold a mere 2,400 copies - which is itself not bad, for poetry.) Britto mentions that the Aterro has a plaque to commemorate Lota’s controversial contribution to the Aterro. He discovered it during a walk - but that was years ago. He never found it again, and could not point the way to it.