Mary Coghill's first collection is a sequence of poems that seeks to engage with the problem of the role of woman in the city. Urbanisation is frequently seen as a male phenomenon, and it is usually men who have written paeans to the cities in which they live. Mary Coghill uses an enormous array of styles and effects to draw her picture of a woman's life in London, showing its joys and its dangers, demonstrating the particular problems that women have in this all-too-masculine environment, and celebrating the feminine side which is all too rarely brought to light. Designed to Fade is a stylistic tour-de-force, and a most unusual sequence of poems.