Slipware — pottery decorated with liquid clay (slip) applied by trailing, dipping, or brushing — appears in poems about English folk ceramic tradition as the art of the vernacular; The slipware dishes of Thomas Toft — with their combed and trailed portraits of royalty, mermaids, and heraldic creatures — are already close to folk poetry: imagery from the culture's common stock rendered in clay; A poem about a seventeenth-century Staffordshire potter might describe the trailing of slip: "the jug turning on the wheel, the pot of white slip in the other hand — the pattern following the turning as a river follows its bed"; In a poem about regional craft identity, slipware marks Staffordshire, Devon, and Sussex as firmly as dialect marks their speech: "the same hand that shaped the vowels shaped the clay — the local inflection visible in both"; The combed slipware of medieval and early modern England — its patterns formed by drawing a comb through wet slip — gives poets an image of beauty achieved by gesture: "the comb dragged through the wet surface, the pattern a record of the hand's speed and angle"; A contemporary poem about a studio potter reviving slipware might describe the choice: "he chose the oldest technique — slip over slip, the trailing line, the record of the gesture remaining in the fired surface."