Fast Break

Edward Hirsch’s “Fast Break” modernizes the elegy while retaining some of the traditional features of the style. Many elegies spend a portion of the poem focused on death itself: thoughts on immortality or the transitory nature of life serve to console the poetic speaker and the reader by lamenting loss while recognizing the natural cycle. “Fast Break” mentions death only in the epigraph of the poem and only by implication. The poem’s action depicts a successful, aggressive basketball transition—the move from defense to offense—executing a precise metaphor along with a piece of bittersweet wordplay. The player does everything right in the poem, but he falls nonetheless. Hirsch’s memorial captures the acute shock of unexpected death; the speaker can only witness and report the player’s fall—he cannot providing any reason or explanation.

“Fast Break” begins in limbo, on a threshold. The basketball lingers “helplessly” on the rim, its fate left to outside cause and effect (Line 2). The speaker describes the player—the “starting center” (Line 3)—as if he is rescuing a child from danger, “gathering” the ball “like a cherished possession” (Lines 5-6). Despite the speed and force of the basketball game, the speaker’s language continues to characterize the player’s movements as careful, precise, and gentle.

The two-line stanzas help the reader visualize the rapidly unfolding rebound and transition on the court, proceeding in one long sentence without much punctuation in imitation of the fluidity of game play. As the poem’s subject turns around with the rebound in line 7, the speaker and reader experience along with the player the sense of urgency to find “the outlet” (Line 8). The speaker telegraphs player movements in lines 8 and 9, constantly shifting focus from the poem’s subject to other players in an echo of the experience of watching an actual basketball game, where speed, misdirection, or angle keeps the viewer from seeing how the ball made it from one player to another.

The speaker describes the players’ motions in terms of tools in line 8 through 10. “Shoveling” suggests work and power (Line 8), while “scissoring” past a defender creates a visual for the quick movement of legs, but also suggesting cutting through the defense with sharp, precise ease. The defender appears “nailed” to the floor in line 11, showing his lackluster skill with tools in comparison.

Technical acumen continues to drive the narrative, in which the transition to offense completes seamlessly, “almost exactly / like a coach’s drawing on a blackboard” (Lines 15-16). This basketball game functions both as memory and metaphor, with this single play emerging as a Platonic ideal of a basketball transition play. The forwards are also ideal, sprinting down court “the way that forwards should” (Line 18). They move so perfectly together that they transcend teammates and become “brothers” (Line 20), fulfilling the promise of sport’s greatest virtue, the ability to create irrevocable alliances, like the one between the author of the poem and the individual being revered.

This transcendent moment of alliance throws off the defense, so that their guard “commits to the wrong man” (Line 24). Once the opposition’s threat neutralizes, the “power-forward explodes,” the verb choice showing that this moment represents a heightening and acceleration of the play. Secure in his perfection, the player ascends “by himself now” (Line 25). The speaker isolates this player, centering the power-forward as the subject of the memorial, the ascending one who is now set apart.

At first, the sweep of effortless perfection sustains the player through the lay-up, when he places the ball “gently / against the glass” (Lines 27-28). But something breaks the spell: The player loses his balance “in the process” (Line 29). The speaker attempts no reasoning; instead, the speaker affirms our inability to know why the player falls—it happens “inexplicably” (Line 30). The speaker’s acceptance of the unknowable, the inevitability of death, resonates with previous elegies. The reader can be consoled knowing nothing could have been done. Even in a world of perfection, death intervenes.

Consolation comes as well when the speaker delivers the line that most directly memorializes and honors the player’s dedication to “the game he loved like a country” (Line 32). This line stands apart in its switch to a past-tense verb and with its simile, which takes us off the basketball court. We return to the game when, along with the player who has hit the floor, we find ourselves “swiveling back to see” the ball in the hoop (Line 33). For the player and the reader, closure comes as the ball continues on, scoring a goal “perfectly” (Line 34), returning to the clockwork world of the game, where things function as expected and order sustains itself.

Like many elegies, “Fast Break” celebrates youth, vitality, and power. The poem also recognizes the consolation of order, the transcendent energy of surpassing the self, and the potential of death’s sudden interruption as a constant shadow. Hirsch’s elegy proposes that immortality resides in action and memory, as the force of love that once carried a man to the heights of perfection still moves through the world in other fast breaks and in other bodies in transition.