Renowned poet writes a new stanza

Literary lights pitch in to help out a dear friend

The poems of Melissa Green reflect an acute sensitivity and a troubled upbringing. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

When Melissa Green took the podium at a Boston University event in her honor in December, the gathering held its collective breath. The assembled poets, publishers, and writing professors, among them a former US poet laureate and Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, were all too aware of the writer's sometimes debilitating depression.

But Green immediately put her well-wishers at ease. "Is this where I get my Academy Award for best supporting actress?" she asked jokingly.

"I'm a mess," she said recently at her home in Winthrop, "but when I get up and read, I do OK."

Green's acute sensitivity and the troubled upbringing that contributed to it have been the subjects of her celebrated writing - "The Squanicook Eclogues," an award-winning epic poem published in 1987, and "Color Is the Suffering of Light," the 1995 memoir that the late Joseph Brodsky described as having been "written in the dark ink of necessity."

After more than a decade of unpublished manuscripts, physical ailments, and personal misfortune, Green has returned with "Fifty-Two," a limited edition of new poems published by Arrowsmith, a small press based in Medford. Green's friends and admirers are helping her look for a major publisher for the work. Already the book has attracted the attention of editors at The New Yorker, and her writing will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Poetry Society of America's newsletter.

This flurry of activity follows a distressing admission that Green had for an old friend last spring. When she told BU professor Rosanna Warren that she and her companion were having trouble putting food on the table, the professor was moved to put out a call for help to the local writing community.

"What I saw last spring terrified me," said Warren, who has known Green since the poet studied with Derek Walcott in the 1980s. It was Warren who introduced her friend's work to Norton, the publisher of Green's first two books.

Her writing, Warren said, is as strong as Green is fragile. In one new poem, "A Saltbox in Vermont," Green dreams of the life she never had - "two desks kissing . . . the latest in a series of sunset-colored dogs, our tall sons . . ."

"It never happened, the house, the oeuvre, the husband holding me, older. Illness married me first, first and forever, put me to bed like a bad child."

"I think she had lost heart in a lot of ways," Warren said. "The practical difficulties of her life got so overwhelming that what frightened me, beyond the financial, was the emotional paralysis I felt from her."

At the BU tribute, a group of writers that included Walcott, a Nobel laureate and BU professor; Robert Pinsky, a former US poet laureate and BU faculty member; and Frank Bidart of Wellesley College, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry from Yale University, read from new work. The poems were printed in a special edition called "A Sheaf for Melissa," a designed collection of 26 copies, lettered A to Z, signed by the authors.

Priced at $1,000 apiece, all of the copies were snatched up by university libraries and private collectors.

Green was astonished by the group effort on her behalf. "The party was the highlight of my life," she said as her eyes watered and her lower lip trembled.

The financial and emotional aid and the renewed interest in her work represent a remarkable improvement over the writer's state of affairs a few years ago, when she contracted an infection in her ankle that threatened the use of her left foot.

"I had an IV pull and big bags of antibiotics in my lettuce drawer," she said as she sat at her work table in the house, once her grandmother's, in which she has lived for 30 years. With a new tenant upstairs, the walls of the first-floor flat recently were repainted; Green's book-lined writing room is a soothing shade of green.

A Velcro brace surrounds her ankle just above her Mary Jane-style house shoes. She remembers when Winthrop's tiny downtown had a shoe store and an ice cream store - all the typical trappings of the 1950s. Now, she said, "it's a dead town."

For Green, reading for an audience still comes naturally. "I have a big streak of the ham in me," she said, smiling broadly.

At BU, among such literary luminaries, it was Green who lit up the room, reading for more than a half-hour and commanding a standing ovation. (Footage of the event can be viewed online at bu.edu.)

Bolstered by the outpouring of support, she has begun work on her next project, an ambitious undertaking in which she plans to reimagine the timeless love story of Heloise and Abelard. The medieval world has always had a particular hold on her.

While modern readers can't help but look at the medieval world through the prism of 19th-century literature and the pre-Raphaelite painters, Green said she hopes to make the 12th century come alive again.

"I have to take that rose window and smash it, take those shards and put it together in a new way. "The hero of this book is going to be the language and the light."

That kind of determination, Warren said, is exhilarating: "The experience for Melissa has been one of regaining faith in her art, that she has an audience, that she exists as a writer. And with faith comes a certain kind of courage.

"I think the stars are aligning for her, and one can never know what that will produce on earth."