Bruce Beaver died peacefully in his sleep on February 17, a few days after his seventy-sixth birthday. He had been under dialysis for a dozen years, so the news was not unexpected. But it is always a shock and a sadness when a commanding poet dies.

Bruce Beaver (born in 1928) published his first collection of poems, Under the Bridge, in 1961, a time when Australian poetry was paddling through something of a lull. The generation of poets who had come to maturity during World War II (Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Douglas Stewart, John Blight, David Campbell et al.) had by the end of the 1950s become, in a sense, predictable. The newer generation was spearheaded by Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s remarkable and zesty first collection, The Music of Division (1959): urbane, a bit Audenesque and very Melbourne. Beaver immediately announced himself as a regional poet – Manly, indeed – and he sustained that capacity to give Manly a soiled, solid, sordid and singing quality, with the whiff of ozone and salt, and an old resilience that would not be smothered by the superficial changes of the subsequent decades.