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Her poems tend to be short, mostly untitled, and resemble inner monologues. In some, the final line throws a new light on the entire poem. The "Byl okean surovyi tsveta stali" (The severe ocean was the colour of steel) (poem 482), describes a ship which makes it safe to harbour during a storm and the sailors happy that the emergency is over, and then culminates with the words: "But what the night promised, no one knew»." In another, recollection of a night walk through a forest and of coming to a river where "the quiet stretch of sand lay pink and golden" and fishermen greeted the sunrise, suddenly ends on the line: «At that time we did not even dream of the whirlpool of tears» (poem 483).

Her Russian poems generally follow traditional metrics and rhyme patterns, though her later poetry displays some most interesting departures from tradition. She admitted: «Many write without rhymes, but I am old fashioned and like music in poetry, but sometimes I love 'free verse' and write like that myself. But I have one self-imposed rule: either free verse, or rhyme, but if it is rhyme, then the entire poem is rhymed.»

Mary Vezey's poems in English form about a quarter of her poetic heritage-As her translations from English show, she was interested in the American poetic renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in the imagists Amy Lowell, John Fletcher, H.D., Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, and others, and was the first to translate Edna St. Vincent Millay into Russian. Her English poetry is dominated by the same themes as the Russian: recollections of childhood vacations in Finland, dreams of becoming a poet, longing for a higher reality, alienation and loneliness, contrast between city and beloved nature, and the search for a path in life. However, her English voice tends to be more independent and assertive and sometimes displays touches of irony, rare in her Russian poetry. An interesting aspect of several later English poems is surrealism, evident in such poems as "Come to the classroom, padre, while the students" (poem 534) and "Night Dance" (poem 531).

The unfinished cycle "My China" occupies a unique place in her English poetry. Though she had lived in China for 21 years, there is but a little trace of China in her Russian poetry, which is generally typical of most Russian poets in China. She did not know Chinese, but was interested in Chinese poetry in English translations. At Pomona College, she published an article on the poets of the Tang dynasty, where she stressed that Chinese poems "are simple and seldom overburdened with useless words. Every word gives a concrete idea, and as a whole, the poem creates a brief, clear picture around which the reader's mind is left to build up the details. Impressionism is the keynote of Chinese poetry. (…) East meets West in the poetical mind."

Most poems in this beautiful cycle begin with an epigraph composed in the style of a quotation from a Chinese poem, though one is taken from an actual poem by Bo Juyi. The poems present loving and attentive glimpses into Chinese nature and people. The cycle begins and ends with poems about poetry. The first (poem 543) describes the loving preparation of brushes, ink tablet, and a "small thick volume," where "the ivory-white rice paper page / is blank," for writing a poem. In the last (poem 561), the poet imagines how, centuries later, her "beautiful polished white bone" will be found in the Gobi desert by a child who "will take it to her father / to make her a flute / to sing a song."