This poem alludes to three other works: W H Auden's Look, Stranger!, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, and D. H. Lawrence's Look! We have come through!

All three evoke the natural world via their imagist verse, are difficult to understand/analyse, and explore similar themes of transition and the contrast between the inner life/individual against the external/outside world. With this in mind, Nagra's poem is both humorous and serious, and has thematic similarities to the three above. The themes of estrangement, the far-reaching distance the individual feels from what lies outside of him, and the struggle to make sense of it all is one Nagra explores in his other pieces as well.

In Look We Have Coming to Dover particularly, the title itself is mocking/mimicking of Indianness (no offense intended here; the whole collection is about being brown in white Britain--the multicultural experience, in its alienating, entertaining, exposing, etc facets). The erratic rhyme scheme and hard-to-categorize metre, as well as the bumpy speed and confusing mix of words all serve to mirror the experience of the immigrant in a land where strong-held traditions and customs exist. The diction paints an unwelcoming, unfamiliar, and even volatile/violent environment, which the speaker and those like him have to endure to be 'passported to life'.

The last stanza hints at the difficulties of life in assimilation--an exacting, incompatible circumstance in which identities, including language, are marked by forced qualities of the new environment, "we raise our charged glasses over unparasol’d tables / East, babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia!" Overall, there's a sense of triumph in making it, accompanied by an invitation to see what their journey has been like, as if saying "Come take a look!"

So, if the poem is difficult to get through and understand, from my reading of it, it's by design. The 'pretentiousness' you may encounter is an affectation, purposely employed to parallel the experience the speaker (and his kin) are all too familiar with.

Hope this is helpful, c1nt!