On the Seventh Wave: Most of us who live by the sea are aware of the phenomenon of the ‘seventh wave’. The seventh wave which breaks more powerfully on the shore, expressing the constant and rhythmic build-up and release of the ocean’s unceasing energy.

For many years, Brother David Hodges has lived as a Cistercian monk on Caldey Island, with the sea and nature’s elemental forces all around him. In his seventh collection of poems, aptly entitled ‘On the Seventh Wave’, Brother David continues to explore the relationship between the natural world and spiritual understanding, the ocean which moves powerfully and mysteriously both in nature and within the human soul.

Brother David’s poems are coloured and enriched by his long experience of contemplative and island life, but they are not inward looking or narrow. His voice is lyrical, but also pithy, as he tackles global, religious and personal themes with both wisdom and wit. He combines deep insight with a light and often humorous touch, and underlying it all, the pervasive spirituality of his calling.

In the words of former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: “As ever, his poems evoke very sharply the physical environment, the rain and spray and wind and sun of the Atlantic; and they consistently steer us from the bracing weather of this coastal territory towards that other interior territory of the wind and sun of grace, leaving us on the coast of our humanity, invited into the depths.”

On the Seventh Wave is available from Caldey Abbey Shop, Quay Hill, Tenby, priced £7.50. The book can be purchased by mail order from The Perfumery, Caldey Island, Pembs SA70 7UH, priced £8.50 including postage, or online from www.caldey-island.co.uk.

• Before becoming a monk, David Hodges practised as a solicitor in Basingstoke, having read Law and Economics at Trinity College Cambridge. His earlier books of poetry, Songs from Solitude, On the Night Tide, Delayed by Rough Seas, Watching for the Wind, Echoes from a Far Shore and The Music of the Ocean, have achieved wide critical acclaim.