Lustreware — pottery with an iridescent metallic surface produced by firing metallic oxides in a reduction atmosphere — appears in poems about Islamic and Hispano-Moresque craft as an emblem of the meeting of light and clay; The lustreware produced in Moorish Spain — in Valencia and Málaga — appears in poems about Al-Andalus as evidence of a civilisation that made beauty from fire and chemistry; William De Morgan's revival of lustreware in Victorian England gives poems about craft revivalism a specific example: "he read the old methods and recovered them, and the light came back into the clay as if it had only been waiting"; In a poem about a museum gallery of Islamic art, lustreware tiles and vessels concentrate the room's light: "the walls give it back differently than they received it — the lustre refusing to hold still"; The chemical process of lustre reduction — the kiln's atmosphere withdrawing oxygen to allow metal to bond to the glaze — gives poets a metaphor for transformation under pressure; A poem about Persia's ceramic tradition might use lustreware as its central image: beauty achieved through a controlled diminishment, the reduction that produces radiance.