Edward Hirsch’s contemporary elegy “Fast Break” commemorates a young man’s vitality and celebrates the moving poetry of basketball. The poem conveys the community and connection achieved through sport, the intimacy of team interaction, and the sublime moment when the individual is absorbed into the power and momentum of a group’s dedication to a singular goal.

Through ten collections over five decades, Hirsch’s poetic career spans the turn of the 20th century American poetry, acknowledging many of its major movements while remaining particular to Hirsch’s singular interest: the search for revelation and human grace.

“Fast Break” appears in Hirsch’s second collection Wild Gratitude (1986), winner of the 1987 National Book Critic’s Circle Award. The title poem of that collection makes the claim that all living things can “teach us how to praise—purring/In their own language, / Wreathing themselves in the living fire” (“Wild Gratitude”). In “Fast Break,” Hirsch shows us the living fire manifest in a memorable instance of perfection—a language of movement that exists between minds and bodies aligned to a common purpose.

Poet Biography

Edward Hirsch’s poetry chronicles American public culture through artistic, social, and at times deeply personal narratives. History, art, public figures, and narratives of all kinds provide subject matter or context for Hirsch’s poems.

Hirsch earned a Ph.D. in folklore; the significance of tradition in human behavior grounds his work, which often examines the material expressions of human emotion. From his first collection, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Hirsch gained recognition as a poet of human emotion and its capacity for transcendence, whether at low points or at ecstatic heights. His ability to inhabit historical, mythological, or ordinary personas gives his work a magical quality, at times bordering on fable.

Hirsch’s prose works include the bestselling his 1999 encomium, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which brought new interest and readers to this art form. His interest in ekphrastic writing led to editing the essay collection Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994) and 2014’s ambitious A Poet’s Glossary, which refined and redefined poetic terms.

Reviewers have called Hirsch a “poet of grief” on more than one occasion. His full-length book Lay Back the Darkness (2003) commemorated children lost at the Terezin concentration camps during the Holocaust, using as a starting point a group of children’s drawings from the camp inhabitants. In 2014, he published Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length terza rima elegy for Hirsch’s son, whose struggle with developmental disorders ended tragically with his death in 2011. Gabriel chronicled both his son’s life and the poet’s attempt to understand and witness the emotional arc of the loss. The book makes a case for the necessity of mourning and remembrance before healing can be addressed.

Among American poets, Hirsch more than anyone else seeks to transform the personal into the universal, finding in his own deepest individual pain into an even deeper public empathy. His poems translate and transfer those emotions through recognizable narratives, modified formal elements, and a clear, conversational tone that creates both intimacy and community.

Hirsch taught in creative writing programs at several schools before becoming president of the Guggenheim Foundation in 2003, where he still serves. Hirsch’s awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Rome Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Merrill Foundation Award, and other honors demonstrate his broad, long-lasting appeal.

Poem Text

Hirsch, Edward. “Fast Break.” 1985. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In “Fast Break,” Edward Hirsch memorializes a friend by describing him in a moment of absolute animation, larger than life. In the poem’s one long sentence, a complex but intuitive series of basketball plays unfold centered on one player, presumably Dennis Turner, the subject of the poem’s epigraph. Birth and death dates in the epigraph tell the reader that the poem stands as a tribute to a life; in “Fast Break,” the narrative may be both a literal memory of the deceased and a metaphor for the subject’s unexpected death.

The poem begins with a depiction of frozen time, a basketball on the rim, neither falling into nor bouncing out of the basket. A player grabs the rebound, and then passes the ball quickly back and forth to other players while moving down court. After faking out a defender, the player takes the ball to the basket. He makes the shot, but in the process, he loses his footing and falls. This abrupt, ungainly end to a sequence of preternatural grace is a metaphor for the way the subject’s life cut short: At the height of vitality and perfection, the main figure of the poem goes down to the floor.

The speaker of the poem acknowledges the basketball player’s love for the game, switching to the past tense to make it clear to the reader that the fall to the floor in the narrative stands in for the man’s death. The poem ends by depicting the man witnessing the completion of his goal despite his fall, as the basketball sinks through the hoop.