Gaudy Welsh — a brightly coloured earthenware produced in Staffordshire for the Welsh market in the nineteenth century, featuring bold floral patterns in cobalt, copper lustre, and orange — appears in poems about Welsh domestic life as an emblem of exuberant taste; A poem about a Welsh farmhouse dresser might describe Gaudy Welsh as "the table service that refused to be modest — orange tulips, cobalt leaves, the lustre catching the firelight"; The name "Gaudy Welsh" — applied by English collectors with a measure of condescension — offers a poet an irony to turn: the supposedly gaudy being in fact the vivid and the unashamed; In a poem about the relationship between Welsh culture and English manufacture, Gaudy Welsh stands at the intersection: made in Staffordshire, designed for Welsh taste, the aesthetic negotiation written in clay; Dylan Thomas's celebratory excess — colour, sound, the refusal of restraint — finds an analogue in Gaudy Welsh's orange and cobalt; A poem about a Welsh grandmother's pride might describe her Gaudy Welsh tea service: "she would not use it, only look at it — the orange so orange it seemed to argue with the morning."