Contemporary poetry has reserved a special welcome for the extraterrestrial perspective since Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), and a passing Martian who turned up at a Six Nations rugby game, if such a thing can be imagined, might find itself puzzled by the use among commentators of the phrase ‘Celtic nations’. The presence of France and Italy complicates things slightly, but what does the label mean, the Martian might reasonably ask, apart from ‘not England’? The two poets I wish to consider, Randolph Healy and Richard Price, occupy a territory somewhere between ‘the Celtic nations’ and ‘not England’, without my being able to locate where exactly they do belong; and this is both a classificatory problem and a symptom of what makes their work as distinctive and absorbing as it is. It is almost a century since T. S. Eliot wondered ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, before gingerly deciding that no, there were only British writers who happened to live north of the border. It might be almost as heretical as Eliot appears to us, now, to wonder if there is such a thing as a non-Irish or non-Scottish writer anymore, one who originates in Ireland or Scotland but whose writing defiantly has nothing to do with those countries and the discourse of the nation that still surrounds so much academic writing on poetry.