Ruskin pottery — the Staffordshire studio pottery known for its extraordinary flambé and souffle glazes — appears in poems about the transformation of the kiln into a site of alchemical experiment; Edward Taylor's Ruskin Pottery, named after John Ruskin but not directly connected to him, produced glazes of exceptional depth and unpredictability — the same formula producing different results from each firing; A poem about the Ruskin glaze might describe its depth: "you could not see the bottom of the colour — it went down into the clay as a lake goes down, the surface merely the beginning"; The Ruskin Pottery's most prized "high-fired" pieces — in deep purples, blues, and flambé effects — appear in poems about the beauty that requires submission to chance: "he prepared the glaze, loaded the kiln, and then the fire decided — what emerged was his only to the degree that he created the conditions for surprise"; In a poem about a museum collection, a Ruskin vase in deep flambe might be described as "the colour of a bruise becoming beautiful — the transition the thing, not the outcome"; A poem about the West Midlands ceramic tradition might invoke Ruskin as the region's finest experiment: "in the shadow of the smoke, a man was making colours that had not existed before — the bottle kilns serving an art the bottle kilns did not know they were making."