Roman Jakobson stands alone in his semiotic theory of poetic analysis which combines semiotics, linguistics and structuralist poetics. This groundbreaking book proposes methods for developing Jakobson's theories of communication and poetic function. It provides an extensive range of examples of the kinds of Formalist praxis that have been neglected in recent years, developing them for the analysis of all poetry but, especially, the poetry of our urban future. Throughout the book the parameters of a city poetic genre are proposed and established; the book also develops the theory of the function of shifters and deixis with special reference to women as narrators. It also instantiates an experimental poetic praxis based on the work of one of Jakobson's great influences, Charles Sanders Peirce. Steadfastly adhering to the text in itself, this volume reveals the often surprising, hitherto unconsidered structural and semiotic patterns within poems as a whole.

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.