It is from this peculiar attention to the fabric and makeup of local life that the poet’s observation spins into meditation. Toward the Imminent Days (Poems Against Economics, 1972) encapsulates much of the quality in Murray’s early poetic voice.

As with the third section of Walking to the Cattle Place (in Poems Against Economics, 1972), where Murray writes: “it is like watching / an emergence,” Toward the Imminent Days presents the “emergence” of an awareness and reimagines an alternative position to our paltry existence as isolated humans on the planet’s surface. Moreover, it reconfigures encounter and exchange—opposed relations of the human and nonhuman, what is known as negative dualism—as integrated elements within the patterns of change and consistency.

Singing,
All living are wild in the imminent days,
I walk into the furrows end-on and they rise
through my flesh
burying worlds of me.

Out walking in farmland, the protagonist’s biological self is trespassed by an energy that moves through the body, reaches the mind, and transforms his cultured ego—a conscious thinking subject, determined by sociological imperatives—into a being that is “wild,” elated, but also giddy: “It is the clumsiest dancing, / this walking skewways over worm-ocean . . . / but it marches with seed and steadiness, knowing the land.”

The phrase worm ocean brings the most particular, small-scale item of our everyday world out of our collective blind spot into our attention. One cannot ignore that Murray is shifting his subject into the light of Darwinian knowledge. Darwin helped us understand the processes that make and remake this Earth and that last millions of years; and the worms remind the poem’s speaker of the “dead men in the fathoms of fields” on which he is standing. They momentarily highlight the poem’s background theme of human temporality.

Fathom is an intriguing word choice, too, laden with the notions of embracing, bringing things together, and breadth of comprehension. Murray’s poetic diction attempts to awaken the human to a new measure of things. More than merely complementing the oceanic metaphor, the word fathom, here, is one of Murray’s best signifiers of an understated ecological principle of continuum.

Bibliography
Imlah, Mick. Les Murray overview in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Edited by Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Murray, Les. Poems Against Economics. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972.