The best recent poetry – review roundup

<p>Bluff by Danez Smith; Fantasia by Nisha Ramayya; a great shaking by Edwina Attlee; Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside; Tanya by Brenda Shaughnessy</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.guardianbookshop.com/bluff-9781784745738?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Bluff</a></strong><strong><a href="https://www.guardianbookshop.com/bluff-9781784745738?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article"> </a>by </strong><strong>Danez Smith</strong><strong> (</strong><strong>Chatto &amp; Windus, £14.99</strong><strong>) </strong><strong><br></strong>In this excoriating collection, we see Smith painfully question their role as an artist in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, in their hometown Minneapolis-St Paul; along with the failures of liberal progressivism in terms of race, class, queerness and gender. Of their support of Obama they write, “Admit it Danez, you loved / Your master … loved / Knowing the colour at the end of my chain / Matched mine … Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.” Smith’s interrogation of poetry’s complicity in suffering is expressed in brilliantly crafted, rhythmically complex verse – “I was part of the joy / industrial complex … forced the dead to smile &amp; juke.” Smith powerfully attacks America’s oppressions, while also violently rejecting the white establishment’s hollow feting of their work – “we wanted to stop being killed &amp; they thanked me for beauty … I bowed &amp; worse, smiled. / teach me to never bend again.”</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.guardianbookshop.com/fantasia-9781915051110?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Fantasia</a></strong> <stron