Wonderfully odd ... Charles Simic. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

Charles Simic has just been named the 15th poet laureate of the United States. On top of this, almost simultaneously, he has won the Wallace Stevens award from the Academy of American Poets (it pays very well: $100,000). All of this recognition comes as Simic edges closer to his 70th birthday (he was born in 1938). I suspect that many people outside of the poetry world have never heard of him, and that's a pity.

I fell in love with Simic's poetry about 30 years ago, when I was a young instructor at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. I wrote to him, inviting him to come to speak to my class. He replied warmly, and appeared a week later. (He was teaching at the University of New Hampshire, where he continued to teach throughout his long career in the classroom.) We have remained in touch over these decades.

Simic is a tall man, born in Belgrade, who came to the US with his family in 1954. He learned English as a young teen, and quickly became fluent, although he has never lost his accent. He began to publish poems in the late 1970s, and his first major collection - still a favorite of mine - was Dismantling the Silence (1971). His distinctive timbre was heard in a short poem (he usually writes short ones) called Fear -

Fear passes from man to man Unknowing, As one leaf passes its shudder To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling. And there is no sign of the wind.

Simic has often been called a surrealist, but I don't think that means much. His poems are just wonderfully odd. They exist in a realm that lies beyond reality, to be sure; but they pull us back into this space where we really do live, "reality." In the poem above, so typical of his work, he establishes a dominant image/metaphor. It's a "deep image", as critics like to say; it lives at the centre of the poem like a watermark in a piece of paper. The poet works the metaphor intensely.

There is a strongly political side to Simic, too, although it's oblique. His work is full of butchery and fear, political trauma, and intense psychic drama. He writes endlessly about insomnia and terror. But he always has that whimsical edge; his poems are more than capable of etching a huge smile on my face. The territory of his imagination is a dream-landscape; but the dream is one of eastern European villages in the Old World. The gallows hangs in the public square. Someone is slaughtering chickens in a barn. An old couple dance. This is Simic's dreamworld.

And yet his poetry is amazingly contemporary. He writes in clear, simple words, in free verse with a voice that seems very much of the moment. He almost never uses a specific metre, nor a rhyme scheme, although the poems have their own inexorable rhythms, and there is endless chiming within them. Each poem becomes a system of linked sounds.

One might argue against Simic that his poems are all the same. I don't care. I like that poem, and its endless variations. There are whole worlds in those little nuggets of language. Simic deserves the recognition, and he should have buckets of readers, who would find his work amusing, moving, shocking, affecting and - most of all - memorable.