Danez Smith writes brilliant, beautiful poems, in the heat of the moment.

Let’s start with the title. “Bluff,” the name of Danez Smith’s fourth collection of poems and the first since January 2020, represents a cliff or a nest, a high point from which one can have a broader view. At the same time, it can also refer, as in poker, to a gesture of deception.

I suppose each is accurate in its own way: the first because, throughout the collection, Smith searches for a larger reference point, a strategy for making sense of the unsustainable, and the second because the poet must ultimately confront the limitations of his art. “If the police kill me,” they warn, “don’t pick up your pen / before you find / your matches.” Sitting in a room writing while the world burns, in other words, is not a revolutionary act.

And yet, what else is there for Smith to do, other than keep writing? He is a poet, after all. That tension leads to a third definition, which emerges in the poem “Dayton's Bluff,” where “bluff” is framed as “the Dutch word for bluff.” On the one hand, this reminds us that, like any form of artistic creation, poetry can be an exercise in self-affirmation. What Smith has in mind, though, it seems, is to peel back the meanings of the word, to dig into its layers, and to explore “how bluffing becomes lying.”

Among the lies Smith wants us to acknowledge is slavery, which the Dutch once practiced as a commercial activity with virulent acumen. In “Bluff,” however, that is not the end point but the beginning. Dayton’s Bluff, after all, is a neighborhood in Smith’s hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, named for the speculator Lyman Dayton, who, during the 1850s, developed the place after the Dakota people who had once lived there were displaced. “Did he mean Dayton’s Bluff,” Smith asks, “as if a people had to disappear over the cliff for their legacy to rise?”

This question is central to both “Dayton's Bluff” and the collection as a whole. In these pages, Smith writes from the intensity of the moment, as he attempts to draw a line back into the past, not because it can provide answers, but because it cannot.

“It’s going to take too many tomorrows,” they suggest at the end of “Relativity,” “to get over yesterday, I pray I have time to deal with now. No, I pray I have time to deal with now.” to “Time.” That subtle shift, in response to the italics (capitalizing the “T” after having lower-case it in the initial reference) frames the passage of time from a concept to a force. Smith reminds us that time is not our friend. If there is an arc of the moral universe, long or short, it may not bend toward justice.

Consider all that Bluff addresses: 2020, the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck in St. Paul. What comes next: the disputed election, an insurrection fomented or carried out by a sitting president on January 6.

What Smith doesn’t pray to is politics. “I voted for the Negro twice,” they recall in “Last Black American Poem,” referring to Barack Obama, “twice my captor / Wore my face. Admit it, Danez, you loved / Your master in your shadow.” The poem is less an apologia than a ruthless indictment, implying that Smith, like all of us, remains complicit in the unequal nation we’ve created. “Happy that we could protest the murders / That we couldn’t end,” they continue, “happy for the health care / That killed us more slowly, happy that gays could marry / In the country where trans women disappeared / Like snow in warm winters.”

Given all this, why write poems or make art? “It doesn’t seem like the time to write,” Smith explains, “when all my muses are begging for their lives.”

And yet I would like to ask: why not? It is precisely at the moment when we doubt art, when we question its value, that it can be crucial to pursue it. Smith writes in a world on fire, with unquenchable flames, whose ignition point lies deep within our collective past.

The answer, sometimes, is to move away from poetic forms altogether. The magnificent “Rondo” incorporates prose, footnotes and a visual layout not unlike a street map to recreate the area once considered “the heart of St. Paul’s African-American community.” The not-so-subtle source of trauma is that Rondo was destroyed in the 1950s to make way for a freeway, another example of the dislocations Smith is trying to evoke.

These disturbances are social, but also personal, or perhaps two sides of a very complicated coin.

“Metro” takes this into three dimensions, bypassing the middle of the page entirely to offer a QR code that opens onto a field of broken lines, divided by what look like telephone area codes. It’s a haunting set of juxtapositions: those numbers, so quotidian against the fractured dispersion of verse. “Less gentle than murder,” the poet writes, “marriage / was the torture I threw myself into when the rain / raged in the distance.” Compare that to these lines from “soon”: “no poem / nor plea nor prayer tore my dad from his wife / nor my grandmother from the ground.” Marriage as battlefield, in other words, family as crucible. “How bloody is Eden’s gate?” Smith wants to know.

Writers are often warned not to work in the heat of the moment, as if a little space is what gives their work prominence. The brilliance and beauty of “Bluff” lies in how effectively Smith eliminates that idea. For them, art is not a sanctuary but a battlefield, at times necessary and useless, and never safe and clean. The writing here pulses and bursts and fills us with discomfort, exploring the ruptures we all recognize. And why not? Why else bother? Why else put in the effort?

“It would be easier,” Smith writes, “if God were dead and we knew it. / Then we could move on: the final human choice: reparation or epilogue.”

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer for Opinion. He is a former editor and book critic for The Times.