Using examples from the poetry of one of the most remarkable poets in post Civil War Spain, Félix Grande, my article attempts to explore the concept of regression to the mother through language, and looking in particular at how the formation of a specifically devastating mother model in childhood leads to the poetic voice’s suicidal drives. I will show how the poetic voice uses language as a maternal shelter that substitutes for and seeks to fix some unbearable memories of an introjected bad maternal object. Grande’s poems textualize psychic processes related to the absence of a mother and/or the presence of a persecutory figure, ultimately opening up the possibility of cathartic regression to a mother referent that would keep suicidal drives at bay. The poem functions as the locus where defective representations of a mother referent are replaced with a therapeutic relationship with language and memory in the hope of symbolically re-establishing genuinely maternal links of protection and reassurance. More interestingly, the problematic mother-son relationship is enmeshed in the historical context of war survival and regression to primeval destruction, making the search for bonds and the necessity to overcome traumatic breaches both more urgent and untoward.