Live Encounters Books-Reviews Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Chords in the Soundscapes by Michael J. Leach
Ginninderra Press, September 2025.
Chords in the Soundscape is a full-length collection of nonfiction poetry about sounds and emotions. This collection is divided into two interrelated sections: ‘The Science of Music’, which focuses more on the technical side of music and sounds in general, and ‘Love Notes’, which focuses more on emotions such as love and grief. The poems in Chords in the Soundscapes are largely autobiographical in that they capture and distil Michael J. Leach’s formative memories from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Connections between Leach’s life and songs from diverse genres are conveyed through various poetry types, from ghazals to prose poems, forming a cycle of deeply personal and human reflections.
Michael J. Leach’s Chords in the Soundscapes is a polyphonic delight. His work is a poetic album of visual, sonic, and narrative compositions that weaves history, science, and theory into powerful emotive articulation. Leach is a textured storyteller with inventive phrasing. Make sure you bathe in sunlight as you curl up on the couch, drop an (imagined) stylus on Chords in the Soundscapes, and press play.
– Alicia Sometimes
More than a tribute to song, Chords in the Soundscapes moves us through music, science, art, confession, numbers, space, and time. Michael J. Leach is a poet ‘dabbling in eternalism’, sharing his playlist of connection and loss, waves of sound and light rendered through the prism of language. The philosopher Simon Critchley says: ‘We are mystics when we’re listening to the music we love.’ Leach has always seemed to know this.
– Nathan Curnow
© Michael J Leach
Michael J. Leach is a poet and academic who lives and works on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Michael has published four poetry books: Chronicity (Melbourne Poets Union, 2020), Natural Philosophies (Recent Work Press, 2022), Rural Ecologies (In Case of Emergency Press, 2024), and Chords in the Soundscapes (Ginninderra Press, 2025). His poems have been recognised in various competitions, most recently first place in the Philippa Holland Award for Poetry 2025.