ABSTRACT
The pace and structure of Genevieve Huttin’s litany—a liturgical and rhetorical form recalled through the invocation of cafe names—is almost cinemato-graphic, including shifting settings, characters, time sequences, and narrative angles. Her images affect and impress but none gives pause for long: they are inserted in a heady, love-struck, movement; there is a sense of pursuing, escaping, not settling down, advancing, in the hopes of attaining someone who cannot probably be reached. Interestingly, Huttin, who works as a program director for the national cultural radio station, France Culture, has also written a series of diary- or note-like poems about “voice,” writer’s block, exile, foreign languages, and especially German. Her own family roots go back to the Moselle region historically torn between France and Germany. The “litany” of the title should be taken, not only as a formal poetic device that Huttin employs subtly, but indeed in its spiritual sense.
