Mahon's relationship with his home place is profoundly troubled and ambiguous. Uneasy with the Protestant culture from which he sprang, and without access to the racial landscape in which his fellow Northern Catholic poets could situate themselves, he epitomises the displaced Northern Protestant for whom ideas of community are highly problematic. Like MacNeice, he is the existential outsider, more familiar with feelings of alienation than those of belonging. Without a community to which he can feel he belongs, he is drawn to romantic outsiders, bohemians, the forgotten and neglected. Thus, he celebrates De Quincey, Edward Dowson, Marilyn Monroe, the forger, the frightened birds in ‘Four Walks’, the gypsies who are indifferent to national boundaries and the conventional social code. And there are in his own family individuals such as ‘Grandfather’ and ‘My Wicked Uncle’ who represent a kind of outlawry with which he identifies. Rather than taking his bearings from a specifically Irish poetic tradition, he draws from a diffuse array of Irish, British, American and European models. His migrant cosmopolitanism is the antithesis of Heaney's rootedness. Where Heaney's landscapes are lushly rural, Mahon's are bleak, post-apocalyptic wildernesses or frozen Antarctic wastes offering little imaginative nourishment or spiritual solace. The mythic West is unable to provide the spiritual home it does for MacNeice or Longley; the natural world is as likely to confirm his alienation as enchant him with its beauty.