In June 2010 my father died after an illness that had started to afflict him about a year previously, as far as I could tell.
He was 84 and had led a very happy life, but the way he had lived it certainly didn’t warrant such suffering.
I’d been working on my poems as usual, intending to get together a collection, but everything had to be put on hold for, as it turned out, about two years. This is the result of my picking things up again, making this collection a tribute to my Dad and conveying something of what his life meant to me.
I have loosely taken the song My Way as a theme, this being my Dad’s favourite song of his favourite singer, Frank Sinatra.
Some of the poems are about what happened to him, but I want to celebrate his path through life and how it set mine in motion.
All proceeds from Stan’s Highway will be donated to charities related to John Webber’s father’s illness.
Getting to know a stranger is never easy, but after reading John Webber’s ‘Stan’s Highway’ I felt I knew his father.
Reading this collection is like sitting next to him in an armchair, as easy and relaxed as reading poetry should be. Never intrusive, quietly incisive, and shot through with a love that is acceptable to share. “Your mouth looks like / It might be singing a song” we are told, and we pray, too, that he was dreaming of Sinatra.
‘Stan’s Highway’ is intimate without ever being voyeuristic and I feel privileged to have sat alongside him for a while.” Ronnie Goodyer, Indigo Dreams Publishing