Books / Poetry
Bristol poet Ray Webber, 1923-2017
It is with great sadness that Steve Bush and Tangent Books have announced the death of Bristol poet Ray Webber. He died peacefully on Monday, November 13 at the BRI aged 94.
Ray was a significant poet whose first collection, High on Rust, was published in 2016 when he was 93. The poems were compiled and edited by Steve Bush.
Ray was born in Redcliffe to Welsh parents, Charles Webber and Kate Regan. His father was a communist and his mother a staunch Catholic. These two huge belief systems dominated his formative years.
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Charlie Webber was one of the three communists imprisoned for leading the Bristol Unemployed marches in the 1930s. Ray was brought up in poverty and had a poor education. He left school at 14 and was conscripted into the army aged 18 to fight in the Second World War. He left the Army in 1946 and it was while serving in post-war Italy and waiting to come home that Ray developed a deep love of poetry having been given a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
He particularly liked Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, the Romantics and Dylan Thomas, but it was TS Eliot, one of the leading lights of the modernist movement, who had the greatest impact on him.
“As I began to understand Eliot, he became a major figure in my life,” said Ray. “I became determined that everything I wrote would be different from everything I read.” Ezra Pound’s literary criticism strengthened his resolve.
In the 50s and 60s, Ray discovered the Beat Generation – poets Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and the novelists William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey – which fuelled his life-long admiration of modern American literature.
Ray also cited Sartre, Kafka, Dostoyevsky and in particular the New York poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others as significant influences on his literary taste. His world outlook was atheistic: “The Catholic church and schools cured me of my religion,” he said. Sartre’s fiction and philosophical works formed the basis of his view that our existence is accidental, not necessary.
In 1974 Ray was able to take early retirement from his job as a postman and concentrate fully on his research and writing. He was entirely self-taught as a writer.
It was in the late 70s that Ray met poet and musician Steve Bush at the Arts Centre in King’s Square. He remained lifelong friends with Steve, his partner Fiona and son Corin, who continued to visit Ray most days right up until his death.
Steve introduced Ray to Richard Jones at Tangent Books and was instrumental in selecting and editing the poems that appeared in High on Rust and which brought him to national attention. Publication coincided with the release of Ray Webber – Ferocious Jump Cuts, a short documentary film on Ray’s life and work.
Read more: Bristol’s Bukowski debut at 93
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