Ray Webber was born in 1923 in Redcliffe, Bristol, of Welsh parents, Charles Webber and Kate Regan. His father was a left-wing activist and his mother a Catholic. The family lived in poverty and Ray had a poor education leaving school at the age of 14. When he was 18 he was conscripted into the army to fight in the Second World War. He left the army in 1946 and it was during his final year in uniform that he began writing poetry.

His earliest work was influenced by Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson and the Romantics, culminating in a Dylan Thomas phase extending into the Fifties. He continued studying literature and art in his spare time and became intrigued by the work of T.S. Eliot.

Over the years, Webber’s work has been recognised by many academics and fellow poets as being of the highest quality, but he has always shunned publicity. He published a booklet in the 1970s but subsequently destroyed all of his work. The poems in this volume have never before been published. They were selected by his friend, the poet and musician Steve Bush.

Responses to High on Rust

 'What a fierce sense of energy, vitriol and devilish laughter. Webber’s verse crackles with acerbic energy and political rage.'

Andrew F Giles, poet, translator, critic 

 'Webber's poetry has a richness of time, place and experience. It feels highly relevant to our politicised times.'

Dr Edson Burton, writer, historian

 ‘If James Joyce had sat in a bar with Frank O’Hara, they could have used the pen name Ray Webber for what they came up with. Inconvenient truths drip from his pen as he echoes the ‘primal scream of the cosmos’.’

Chris Hunt, editor, Broken Ground Press

 “Webber writes that he’s ‘the poet who abhors the poetic’. That’s a lie. But his poems aren’t cutesy odes – they are direct, unfiltered and darkly, darkly funny.

Michael Shaw, former deputy editor, The Times Educational Supplement