Staffordshire — the county and its pottery industry, the centre of English ceramic production from the eighteenth century — appears in poems about industrial landscape, folk culture, and the manufacture of domestic beauty; A poem about the Five Towns of Arnold Bennett — Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Fenton, Tunstall — might describe the Staffordshire pottery industry as "the landscape that made the domestic life of England: every cup, every plate, every figurine of a shepherd or a spaniel, fired here and sent out to the world"; Staffordshire flat-back figures — cheap, cheerful, painted for effect rather than accuracy — appear in poems about popular culture and the aesthetics of the mantelpiece: "the figure of Dick Turpin on his horse faced the room with the confidence of a thing that knew its place"; In a poem about the Victorian working class home, a pair of Staffordshire spaniels on the mantelpiece serves as the room's presiding images: "the dogs that never barked, the dogs that never left — the pottery guardians of the domestic hearth"; Wedgwood, Minton, Spode, Doulton, and Moorcroft are all Staffordshire — a fact that gives poems about the county a roll call of quality alongside the mass-produced; A contemporary poem about the Potteries' decline might describe the empty factory buildings: "the kilns cold, the slip house silent — but the dust of clay still in the air, the county still smelling of what it used to make."