Volleyball is a game about never letting the ball touch the ground, which makes it a sharp choice for a poem about someone who is dying. In Brenda Neth's "The Volley," a tall, fiercely competitive woman keeps playing, and keeps the conversation in the air, while a disease the poem never names closes in on her. The central idea is the gap between knowing and acting. She chooses to live entirely in the present moment, and the poem can't decide whether that choice is magnificent or lonely. It lets us feel both.
The metaphor runs on two tracks. A volley is a rally of shots, but it is also a back-and-forth of words, and the opening lines join the two: she is "undaunted in her courage to spike / the ball of conversation one more time." Spiking is the most aggressive move in the sport, a smash that ends the exchange. Applied to talk, it means forcing the unspeakable subject onto the table. The later lines show the result: she screams "Spike" "into a silenced victory," and the poem notes "the conversation lull." Her win leaves a hush. The question "Does everyone have to know the truth?" hangs there unanswered. We can't tell whether she is asking it or the speaker is.
The poem is also unsettled about what she actually knows. Early on, "She cannot ignore what she knows," yet near the middle we are told "Everyone knows but her." These lines contradict each other, and the contradiction seems deliberate. It suggests a gap between what she knows privately and what she will admit, perhaps even to herself. Her cry, "Not yet… I am not ready for the fall," carries the same double meaning. A fall is what happens to a ball that is missed, to a body that gives way, and, by the end, to a life.
The imagery keeps pulling her between solid and fading. She is "translucent," a word for something you can almost see through, and later she "fights to stay illumined," as if she were a lamp that might go out. Against this, her body is all weight and heat: "Nearly six feet tall, she is grounded by the reality of her own disease," where "grounded" puns on height, gravity and being kept from play. The sand is "burning her skin as she goes." The odd verb "ferry" in "What battle can she ferry through" usually belongs to a crossing over water. Judging by the imagery, it quietly turns her struggle across the sand into a journey toward some far shore. Her self-portrait, "Awkward, alive, ambitious," is also telling. It's three clipped words, two of them beginning with the same vowel, and "awkward" is a surprising thing to find in a tribute. She is not graceful here, only determined.
The form matches this restlessness. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just free verse with lines that swing between long, flat statements and short, hard ones like "Which is now, nonetheless." The poem is one unbroken block with no stanza breaks, so it reads like a rally with no pause for breath. Full stops are rare, and the questions ("What battle can she ferry through") often lack question marks, so they feel like thoughts that drift off rather than ones that wait for answers. The fragment "And winning the game herself" leaps ahead of its sentence, much as she leaps ahead of everyone else.
The sharpest detail may be the line "She does not know the meaning of the word 'teammate.'" Volleyball depends on teamwork, so her solo drive to "score" is both heroic and isolating. This is why the victory is silenced: she wins alone. The poem admires her without pretending that this is easy to live beside.
The ending leaves a final unease. We expect the poem to finish on the game, but it jumps forward: "Later, in dreams, she will remember / What it was like to die." Remembering death in the past tense sounds impossible. It could mean the dying will already be over, or that dreams are the only place she will admit what she cannot say aloud now. That is where the poem's significance lies. It avoids both pity and easy inspiration, and it asks whether refusing to flinch is the bravest thing a person can do, or simply the loneliest.