A book of poems for his late wife

Chichester poet Ronald Rodger Caseby offers his writings to his late wife in his new book The Book of Eveline.

Subtitled Poems to My Wife, it is available from Amazon at £16.

“Two years after Daphne, my first wife died on 10/05/1987, I wrote to a Church Dating Newsletter and as a result met Eveline, a few months older than myself,” Ronald recalls.

“We first met at Chichester Cathedral on a very hot June Sunday afternoon. During the wonderful service, God made it separately clear to each of us that he had made us for each other.

“We became engaged on 26/06/1988. A year later we married on 21/06/1989 at Eveline's church in Tunbridge Wells.

“From then on, I wrote poems for her on each personal occasion, such as birthdays, the day we first met, Valentine's Day, holidays, Christmas, etc. Sadly she died in hospital on 18/03/2026. It was then that I discovered that she had kept every poem carefully in a binder. Some of those poems are now the basis of this book's love story.”

Ronald, aged 90, offers the book as a tender tribute to a quiet steadfast woman who touched more hearts than she ever realised. Through poems and reflections and memories gathered across the decades, it's a book that honours, as Ronald says, her gentle strength, her humour and her resilience and the love that she shared so generously.

Ronald said the hope is that the pages will offer comfort, encouragement and moments of recognition to anybody who has loved deeply and who has lost dearly or who has walked through life's shadows. He offers it as a book shaped by gratitude and by faith.

“What I did was every event, or meeting or Valentine's Day or birthdays or Christmas or whenever, I would write a poem to her along with cards and gifts from me. She started keeping them in a file folder, and I think eventually there was something like 186.

“The book is published because my brother Cyril, who is 97, wanted to see the book. I was told by his family that he had been taken suddenly very ill and was not going to survive more than a few days. He wanted to see the book having lost his own wife and so I had the book published immediately.”

Happily Cyril, who lives in a home in Aberdeen, did live to see the book: “and he is still surviving now because like me he is a survivor!”