I woke up this morning with a line of poetry in my head, I forgot the line almost immediately but remembered the poet, Bruce Dawe. Dawe is not a forgettable poet - he has many memorable lines of verse - but my waking mind was about something that I didn't quite understand.

So I googled Dawe to see if he was still alive, only to find that somehow, I had missed his passing last April. He was 90, a ripe age, as they say, but I wondered how I hadn't heard or read about his departure. It seemed odd as I am attuned to such events. I had taught Dawe as an HSC poet in senior English classes and I enjoyed teaching him because, students liked him. And they got him.

Dawe makes his genial turn of phrase, his song of the Australian vernacular, seem so easy to do. His subject matter was typical of what concerned 'ordinary people', cornflakes stuck to kitchen walls for example, but his writing was deceptive in this sense. I tried writing in the fashion of Dawe when I was teaching him only to come a cropper. It's not easy at all.

I remember being at a party of arty folk in the 1990's and chatting to a published poet. I mentioned Dawe as someone I regarded as important to the cause of poetry only to be met with a half sneer. Said poet then pulled a sheaf of poems from his cloak (I jest, they were in a folder) and let me read them. His work was erudite, intense and opaque. He had a vast command of the most arcane vocabulary. Even though I knew the subject from the title, the meaning of the poems was never clear, lost in the tight, self-enclosing world of the abstruse. I said some kind words about his obvious skill as a poet and left it at that. I didn't want to read any more because his work was a dry as a bone.

Poems should be challenging, their compression of language and literary devices making us think, and then think again. Bruce Dawe's work did not take a lot of unravelling but it challenged students to think how poetry can say something meaningful even as it is comprehensible.

Vale Bruce Dawe.