But perhaps his most influential poetry teacher was Donald Davie at Stanford, where he also worked with Kenneth Fields, Albert Gelpi, N. Scott Momaday, Diane Middlebrook and others.

Gery's poetry is heavily influenced not only by Pound, but by the avant-garde work of John Ashbery and his predecessors Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding.

Stephen Behrendt describes Davenport's Version (2003), a book-length narrative poem set during the Union occupation of Civil War New Orleans that portrays "a triangular relationship that melds passion, deception, and betrayal in ways that parallel the tragic and internecine war" itself, as "a remarkable feat of poetic and psychological sleight of hand."

(2014), a collection he calls "multiple and wide-ranging," Daniel Wallace writes how "Gery troubles his readers with doubts, failings, and deeply grounded despair" but in verse that "is in turn whimsical, comic, erotic, and nostalgic."

is most obvious in poems that examine the conflict between the activist's urge to fight and the artist's need to give form to experience" in what she calls a "beautifully staged collection."

In Michigan Quarterly Review, Laurence Goldstein says that “Educators in all fields should become better acquainted with the range of texts surveyed in Gery's book, because all the articulate wisdom in the world will be barely enough to avert the danger these poems stare at without blinking.” Most often, Gery considers the poetry he explores for its articulation of ideological, ethnic, sexual, or racial identity.

In addition to co-editing two volumes of critical essays on Pound, he has co-authored In Venice and Veneto with Ezra Pound, a biographical and literary guide, with Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Massimo Bacigalupo, and Stefano Maria Casella, and has collaborated with Vahe Baladouni on a biography of an Armenian poet of the early twentieth century in Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of Pure Spirit.

Gery has collaborated on translations, including from Armenian (with Vahe Baladouni), Serbian (with Biljana D. Obradović), Chinese (with Xiaobin Yang and Guiming Wang), Italian (with Caterina Ricciardi and Massimo Bacigalupo), and French (with Ivan Zaknic).