Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Reviews / Main Posts The Children of Leonidas Kerry Leves Nicholas Graspias Ginninderra ISBN 9781740275378 $22 Dark, impassioned, violent, Nicholas Grapsias’ The Children of Leonidas, a sequence of narrative poems, tells of Greece in the 1940s. The first half is about the German occupation and the resistance. Vignette after vignette depicts the cruelty of both sides. In ‘Athens, 1941’: in a circle the SS officers eat quails sharing jokes laughing a mother in a black scarf gathers the bones they flick placing them in her children’s mouths she weeps whispering eat them eat them The most memorable character is ‘The Butcher’, leader of an anti-Italian squadron that re-groups as a resistance cell after the surrender. He gets his name because ‘He made us hold down/ Italian prisoners as he cut their throats,/ explaining as he did so/ the importance of saving bullets’. ‘The Butcher’ connects ancient Greek epic and historical legend, The Iliad and Alexander and the story of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, with twentieth-century warfare. ‘Every liberty you own today is soaked/ with some patriot’s blood.’ The free verse of this book is at times magnificent; its voice – based on the poet’s grandfathers’ diaries and oral stories – can be devastatingly strong. A little plain prose historical horizon-setting might have helped, particularly with the second half, which is about the civil war of the late 1940s. The carnage – nearly every double page spread offers a new atrocity in graphic detail, including axe murder, dismemberment, impaling, rape, disembowelment and point-blank execution of one family member by another (‘Don’t let them torture me!’) – accumulates in a way that produced, in this reader, a slight feeling of hysterical dissociation. This near-great book has affinities with splatter movies. But so does a lot of history. Kerry Leves Kerry Leves (1948–2011) was a poet and critic who regularly contributed to Overland before he recently passed away. He composed this poem for the ‘Sydney: Endless City’ reading of the Harbour City Poets group at the Sydney Writers Festival, May 2011. More by Kerry Leves › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 5 November 20245 November 2024 · Reviews True dreams: Martin Edmond’s Conrad Dougal McNeill Witnessing, reading through this absorbing, elegant, careful example of the art, is always a kind of mourning, and Conrad, an author for whom writing was “the conversion of nervous force into phrases,” is the perfect figure to focus Edmond’s ongoing work of mourning. 28 October 2024 · Reviews Debt to the world Francesca Newton A Difficult Year misses the solution evident in its own story. Were it to look more closely, the film might challenge the weak political clichés it skewers with powerful truths: that those worried about the climate and their money have more in common than what divides them; that only a movement focused on ending both environmental and economic exploitation can defeat a politics with no interest in stopping either.
