As Dunedin prepares to celebrate its 150th anniversary of incorporation as a city on Monday, a cup of coffee at a poetry reading gets John Gibb musing on the city's rich literary history.
Already plenty of other people here, as you edge in, a couple of minutes late.
A chair scrapes.
And the place looks completely packed.
As you stand awkwardly near the counter of this popular vegetarian cafe, looking for somewhere to roost, someone else arriving slightly after you magically finds a previously invisible chair and sits down.
But, yes, one of the cafe's senior staff points out, there are still a few more seats down at the end, near the readers.
This is the latest of a long-running monthly series of poetry readings, run by the Octagon Collective, at Circadian Rhythm vegetarian cafe.
Your cup of coffee duly arrives, and you sip it.
And, shortly, the first of the evening's poets starts to read.
The evening's programme is open and democratic.
Each poet reads one poem, or a couple of short ones, and later there are to be two guest poets.
Tonight, at this stage, you're initially sitting alone but your spirits are quickly lifted by the sometimes gliding, sometimes jerky rhythms of these poets, as they read.
You close your eyes and the words sail across your darkened mind, like bright butterflies floating over low hedges and flower beds somewhere else in the city, as if during an endless drowsy summer.
• ''God of Nations at Thy Feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices we entreat,
God defend our free land.''
Some other words drift into your head, as you later reflect on Dunedin's literary past.
They are from what is probably New Zealand's most well-known poem, God Defend New Zealand.
And the more you think about their author, former Dunedin journalist, editor and poet Thomas Bracken, the more you wonder about the man himself, the remarkable place his poem now occupies in New Zealand life, and the deeply paradoxical nature of his life and of the poem itself.
Bracken certainly knew plenty about life's highs and lows.
Born in Ireland in 1846, and baptised a Catholic, he quickly became an orphan, his mother dying when he was 5 and his father, a postmaster, dying when he was about 11.
Initially looked after by an aunt, he was then sent to the care of his uncle, a farmer living near Melbourne, Australia, when he was 12.
Bracken later became a horseman and shearer, and started to write poetry.
He came to Dunedin in 1869, and, from humble beginnings, he subsequently won the Otago Caledonian Society's prize for poetry.
Having also moved into journalism, he founded a successful threepenny weekly newspaper and later became an MP, representing Dunedin Central, in 1882.
A supporter of the egalitarian policies of Governor Sir George Grey, he showed a strong concern for the underprivileged, and also criticised the Government's dealings with Maori at Parihaka for what he saw as a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi.
God Defend New Zealand drives forward confidently with its use of imperative verbs, strong rhythms, triple rhymes and a striking double refrain, and powerfully makes the case for valuing people of ''every creed and race''.
Bracken had become the most well-known and popular New Zealand poet of the 19th century, and in 1897 this achievement was crowned when the then New Zealand Prime Minister Richard Seddon handed a copy of Bracken's most famous poem, and its accompanying music, to Queen Victoria.
Nevertheless Bracken struck financial trouble, his health declined, and he died in poverty.
His haunting and also once famous poem Not Understood, also deserves more attention, with its evocation of ''How many cheerless, lonely hearts are breaking!/ How many noble spirits pass away.''
Ironically, not only are the words of a man who died penniless sung on most big public occasions, and in the presence of many people much wealthier than Bracken, but the popularity of the poem itself is somewhat ironic.
It is a particularly lively example of a kind of public verse, popular in the 19th century, but which is now largely out of fashion.
University of Otago Emeritus Prof Lawrence Jones, a nationally respected specialist in New Zealand literature, says Bracken and the work of many other Dunedin writers of the 19th century have been underestimated and deserve more attention, although many of their poetic genres are no longer fashionable.
And, for lovers of literary mysteries, Prof Jones points out that Bracken may also have written a novel, but the text has never been found.
Also strongly egalitarian in spirit is Anno Domini 2000, or, A Woman's Destiny (1889) usually regarded as New Zealand's first science fiction novel, written by a former journalist, former Otago Daily Times editor and former prime minister, Sir Julius Vogel.
It includes some scenes set in Dunedin, and envisages a utopian world where women hold many positions of authority, where a form of inclusive joint international government is in place, and where, among many technological improvements, air ships ( ''air-cruisers'') quickly cross the world.
Some of the best-written and memorable sections of the novel are when Sir Julius affirms the need to eliminate poverty and excessive inequality.
Playing key roles in the importance of literature in the Dunedin of the 20th century were the establishment, in the 1950s, of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, by an anonymous group believed to include the late poet Charles Brasch, A crucial role was also played by Brasch as the founder and first editor of Landfall, still New Zealand's most important literary journal.
He also encouraged the development of a broader ''imaginative order'', including other aspects of life and culture, among New Zealanders.
Landfall's current editor, David Eggleton, a former Burns Fellow (1990), is also an award-winning critic and, like Brasch, also a fine poet, who combines a kind of both public and more intimate and private poetry.
Eggleton also has a sharp eye for satire, and a recent poem focuses on New Zild Book Awards Considered as a Five-Horse Race, visualising the competing books as ''a boxed set'' which is ''fairly well down the straight'' in a madcap horse race.
Dunedin is also home to novelist Philip Temple, and to many poets and fiction writers, including Vincent O'Sullivan, Peter Olds, Diane Brown, Sue Wootton, Emma Neale, as well as many writers of children's fiction.
And many other fine writers, including James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and short-story writer O. E. Middleton are part of the city's 20th-century literary heritage, as are former Dunedin residents, including Brian Turner and Cilla McQueen.
Prof Jones notes that several former Burns Fellows, including Hone Tuwhare, have come to Dunedin initially to take up the fellowship but ended up living much longer in the city.
Otago University historian Prof Tom Brooking says gold, discovered in the 1860s, played a major role in transforming the former ''Mud-edin'', with its initially wattle and daub cottages and mud-filled streets, into the more modern and prosperous city it later became.
Dunedin's new standing as a Unesco City of Literature, and its strong background as a city of writers clearly adds to its ''cachet'' and international reputation, Prof Brooking says.
And the city's cultural vibrancy clearly makes it a more attractive place to visit and live in, he says.
The Dunedin Sound, involving the city's songwriters and musicians, is part of the richness, having been recently celebrated at a packed concert in the city.
The redevelopment of the Toitu Otago Settlers Museum and, earlier the Otago Museum, both with strong Maori displays, and that of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, have also strengthened Dunedin's cultural infrastructure.
• Back at the vegetarian cafe, you start eating the food you ordered, a quite strongly flavoured samosa and an intriguing small bun, with tomato.
And here are the guest poets, tonight Martha Morseth and Diane Brown - both well known and respected.
But even before they start to speak, you can't help being impressed by the consistently high quality of the many previous poets who have read, despite the odd fleeting awkward moment.
Now Morseth and Brown are reading- deftly and imaginatively engaging with some of life's crises and challenges large and small.
Both are witty, and quirky - their words glow. Brown seems slightly anxious about how people will respond to sections she has chosen to read from a large ''poetic narrative'', but she needn't have worried.
What you have learnt even before the guest poets read is that here is a city with a real engagement with living literature.
Here is an eagerness not only to put words together and read them, but also to listen to what others have done.
And here is the real heartbeat of literature, and of an engagement with writing that is deeper and more complex than simply a few solitary literary heroes soaring above while others witlessly struggle below.
By the time you leave, you realise the ''City of Literature'' is also real and is not simply overheated branding rhetoric.
And, as do many others who have been here, you also leave on a high. When you step back into the dark street, many of those amazing words and word patterns you have heard from this extraordinary and friendly league of wordsmiths are still flying, with bright wings, at the back of your mind.
