Mehrotra’s first formal introduction to poetry was at the University of Allahabad, where he began studying at the age of 17. Raised by his uncle, a professor of English, and referred to as ‘Uncle Kelly’ in several poems, he was exposed to the western modernist writing of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. In an interview he says, ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’ Modern English, therefore, becomes a medium through which the poetic traditions of everyday life around him became clear, as he is drawn to its surreal tonalities in search of an alternative language. In an interview he says: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ 

While Laugh Club of Gandhi Park is an unvarnished snapshot of life in Gandhi Park, where Mehrotra, in his minimalistic style, evokes nuanced themes of social and economic entrapment, Lahore, is a meditation on the city where Mehrotra was born in 1947. While the former poem evokes the daily life of the park, Lahore reminiscences the nostalgia of fabled history and speaks to themes of isolation, both in in the lives of residents. For Sale or Rent is written in the style of a commercial advertisement for a home. Mehrotra utilises his stylised and clinical descriptions of this home, and its inhabitants, to highlight elements of the mundane, and even the macabre, within the realm of everyday life. 

The minute, true-to-life details, from which many of his poems are comprised, give Mehrotra’s poetry a candid, documentary-like quality. The imagery which appears within his work is often that of the natural world, which Mehrotra sometimes uses to draw parallels between forms of human and natural life, as in Lockdown Garden where mulberry leaves allude to a longing for closeness. Mehrotra also makes frequent use of enjambment in his works, especially those which deal with subversive themes. Engraving Of A Bison On Stone, which contends with ideas of war and national identity uses of enjambment to create the impression of a frank, yet reflective - commentary on how the land holds the memory of warfare from the armies which it sustained and fed.  

Mehrotra has translated a variety of traditional Indian poetry, and his translation style, in his own words, circumvents what he finds “repetitive or formulaic”. Mehrotra’s first translation is a poem by Kabir, written c. 15th-16th century, where the frank and gritty rendering of the poem conveys a story of birth through to death, with existentialist undertones and blunt reflections about the carnality of life. In the second translation by Mehrotra, a poem by Bhartrihari from c. 5th century BC expresses the direct address of a deity by the poetic voice, who confronts ideas of fate and nihilism. By narrating the original he invokes the sound, feel and texture of these classical pieces, followed by its modern English renderings.