Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Main Posts / Reviews 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 13 April 202314 April 2023 · Reviews ‘Capitalism plus wind turbines’: Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale and the financialisation of climate change Scott Robinson In monetary terms, investment firms have both a lot to answer for and a lot to supply in terms of achieving the pace of transition required to mitigate some of the catastrophic effects of climate change. Pragmatists on the left, including proponents of the Green New Deal, eye the enormous resources floating around in the financial world as possible sources of green investment. Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale answers this temptation with a firm, detailed ‘No.’
