About the Author:
Rob Jackaman was born in England in 1945 and did his undergraduate degree at King's College, Cambridge. He then won a Commonwealth Scholarship to do his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and subsequently became a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he still currently teaches in the areas of modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing. He has written books on English Surrealist poetry and on the relationship between poets and publishers in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. He is also a well-published poet, with thirteen volumes to his name; and is the editor of the Hazard Australasian Poets series. He has been guest editor of both Landfall and Poetry Australia.

Broken English/Breaking English discusses the work of a number of prominent contemporary poets writing in English. It argues that increasingly in the recent past, English as a poetic discourse has come under pressure from hitherto marginalized forms of the language, ultimately resulting in the breakdown of the notion of a single, uniform, "standard" or "pure" English, that idea being superseded by the assertion instead of a number of different englishes, all equally valid, and indicative of the multivalent nature of the term "English" at the start of the new millennium.