Nantgarw — the Welsh porcelain factory near Cardiff, operating briefly from 1813 to 1820, producing a translucent, ivory-white porcelain of exceptional quality — appears in poems about brief perfection and the tragedy of the unsustainable; A poem about William Billingsley — who pursued the ideal of soft-paste porcelain across several factories before founding Nantgarw — might describe him as "the last of the porcelain romantics, moving from kiln to kiln in search of the perfect body, finding it finally in Wales and losing it to the economics of beauty"; Nantgarw's porcelain, so translucent that flowers painted on it seem to glow from within, gives poets an image of light as a quality of the object itself; In a poem about Welsh cultural pride, Nantgarw stands as the finest thing the Welsh clay ever produced — and the most briefly: "two years of perfection, then silence, then the moulds sold and the kiln cold"; The Nantgarw painters — decorating the white ware with flowers of extraordinary delicacy — appear in poems about anonymous skill: "their names are known to scholars, not to the pieces they painted"; A contemporary poem about a museum acquisition might describe a Nantgarw plate: "the light comes through it slightly — not quite transparent, not quite opaque — the porcelain holding its own uncertainty as a quality."