THE CROWD is expectant, adoring, reverential. We pack in to the seats. Some get down on the floor. Some wedge in between the counters. There's excitement and magic in the air. Some try to sit on stacks of books, on protruding shelves, on the steps of the ladders, on each other's laps.
A lead-singer with a mega following is going to perform maybe? An impromptu rock gig, perhaps? Well, no, in fact it's a . . . a poetry reading . . . in a bookshop . . . and it's the hottest ticket in town. Weird but true. And here come the superstars.
Dennis O'Driscoll and Thomas McCarthy are about to read from their latest collections. There are poets and then some. "Yes, there's a plague of poets here," says John Montague, looking about him. "Or a pride?" His wife, Elizabeth Wassell, suggests "a plethora of poets." How about a profundity of poets?
It's not like it was in the 1950s, says Montague, the first to hold the newly-created Ireland Chair of Poetry, a professorship funded by the Arts Council and based in UDC, TCD and Queen's. Nowadays, he says: "I think we get along, there's great affection."
Seamus Heaney and wife Marie sit in the second row. Theo Dorgan is up at the top of the class. Poet Tony Curtis, close to the top as well, is just back from a four-month poetry-reading tour of Australia. "Anybody who stands still - we read to them," he explains. It's a veritable Cuirt na bhFili.
Quietly the Cappoquin-born McCarthy explains that poets listening to other poets "eat each other in bits and pieces and regurgitate the best parts." Very appetising.
After reading two light-hearted poems, O'Driscoll threatens to read "about 14 dark ones". He has the floor. Who will stop him? He begins to read Delegates, drawing us in. Then he slows to a stop. "Ah, there's more to that but who cares? Who cares?" he asks, sighing. We're all smiling - then he mentions a poem about honeymoon cystitis.
Up next to the mike is McCarthy. As a youth he was a member of the Lismore Fianna Fail Cumann, he tells us - but not any more. He reads his poem, Shroud - it's about Charlie Haughey, he explains, who came back from Japan in 1989 after meeting the Emperor. Haughey returned "more imperial than ever - he became intolerable, an object of veneration." In his poem, he asks: "Is it power only? The sacred? The Shroud of Turin that fills our man with the Jesus thing?" One of his heroes is Nabokov, "a kind of Russian Micheal Mac Liammoir", he tells us.
"This is a major occasion," says poet Michael O'Loughlin. "All their contemporaries are here." The Mayo man, poet Richard Murphy, is there too. He is off to Durban in South Africa shortly. Poet James McAuley is back from an academic career in the US, at East Washington University. A northsider Dub, he's back permanently and lives "in economic exile" in Co Wicklow.
Lovers of poetry, such as solicitor Kenneth Morgan, in a three-piece pinstripe suit, are here too. Cork-based artist Patrick Scott, with a head of wild white hair, is listening attentively. Broadcaster Teri Garvey is thrilled to be told that a poem in O'Driscoll's collection is dedicated to her.
Opera singer Judith Mor says that the gathering at Waterstone's in Dawson Street has "a unique atmosphere - it's a very pleasant atmosphere, it's very different from other readings. I find it exceptional." The presence of Frank Daly, from Abbeyside in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, one of the three revenue commissioners, causes many to smile and a small few to worry.