Jon Glover's book Our Photographs (1986) was a 'powerful, beautiful, moving book which will stand the test of time', wrote John Lancaster. Several Poems from that collection appear in To the Niagra Frontier, since Glover engaged in a large-scale 'work in progress', the earlier poems acquiring new resonances when read with the substantial body of the new pieces.
Our Photographs follows a man leaving nineteenth-century Scotland for life in the United States. We see his reactions and those of the people he encounters. The new poems go further, probing the loss and rediscovery of identity, the way in which place and history relate, the instability of language in trying to record our experiences with precision and authenticity.
America, especially the upstate New York invoked in the title, represents a refuge, but also a place of violence. Glover experiments with his language, incorporating prose and verse, to create - but not complete - an accomplished and memorable work.