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 8 April 20249 April 2024 · Reviews Settlers or workers? Jordan Humphreys’ Indigenous Liberation & Socialism Jon Piccini In Indigenous Liberation & Socialism, historian and activist Jordan Humphreys probes the Australian far left’s evolving attitude towards Indigenous peoples, locating a tradition of working-class solidarity dating back to the 1890s. Humphreys is not blind, however, to the fact that this tradition was a minority perspective, or that solidarity was often clouded by paternalism and assimilatory thinking. 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.