In ancient Greece, the eccentric Diogenes owns nothing but shares his wisdom with ordinary people, philosophers, and kings: live on nothing and be free; laugh and think; and live for wisdom, not riches.

This collection of thirty-one poems is Seamus Heaney's first since Station Island. The Haw Lantern is a magnificent book that further extends the range of a poet who has always put his trust in the possibilities of the language.

All the extant fragments of Herakleitos and a collection of Diogenes' words from various sources. Herakleitos' words, 2500 years old, usually appear in English translated by philosophers as makeshift clusters of nouns and verbs which can then be inspected at length. Here they are translated into plain English and allowed to stand naked and unchaperoned in their native archaic Mediterranean light. The practical words of the Athenian street philosopher Diogenes have never before been extracted from the apocryphal anecdotes in which they have come down to us. They are addressed to humanity at large, and are as sharp and pertinent today as when they were admired by Alexander the Great and Saint Paul.

With something of a poetry renaissance currently under way worldwide, there is now, more than ever, a need for a solidly-based methodology for interpreting poems: something more empirical than traditional ‘lit-crit’ approaches, and something more linguistically-informed than the version of ‘postmodernism’ rampant in certain Anglophone universities. The latter approach, which tends to allow the individual reader to do what he/she likes with a poetic text, is inadequate to interpret modernist poetry, whose English-language precursors may be found in the late Romantics; its pioneers were already writing (in France) as early as 1840. What is so different about the modernists? Most importantly, their works are monumental, in that they are strongly resistant to deconstruction. Contributing to this resistance is the fact that they are built around two deep-level propositions, each of which generates a set of indirectly-signifying images, sharing the same internal structure, but having a different vocabulary. Thus, they do not signify according to linear narrative, but according to these propositions—and the relation between them—which may be reconstructed by a careful comparison of images on the textual surface. Every text—as subject-sign—refers to an intertextual object-sign, which is usually another poem, but may also be a film or other form of art. Mediating between these two signs is their reader-constructed interpretant, which completes the semiotic triad. As this book shows, the novelty of this sign is thrown into relief by the contrast it makes with a lexical counterpart from the reader’s experience, which differs from the interpretant in structure. The book’s inclusion of French and Japanese, as well as English poems, shows that deep-level signifying mechanisms may well be universal, with considerable research and pedagogical implications.

"This is a creative re-enactment of the life, death and ideas of the most influential Cynic of antiquity, Diogenes of Sinope. Lost after 2500 years, the dialogues attributed to him are here recovered through informed historical re-imagination, and in a series of six "acts" Alexander takes his protagonist from his market-place teachings through to the final condemnation of his works, and execution of his person. In this quasi-Socratic tragedy, Diogenes' ideas of simplicity, moderation and natural living are too revolutionary for an oligarchical system to tolerate, and yet prove too resilient to be permanently silenced. Alexander is faithful to the spirit of ancient authors and deftly works in subtle allusions to ancient sources - yet writes ever with an eye to present problems. His Diogenes becomes an essential voice for the revolutionary and potentially apocalyptic transitions of our own time." - William Desmond, author of "The Greek Praise of Poverty"