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“Poetics of Grief and Mourning: Presence of Mother in Natasha Tretheway’s Poetry.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 37.4 (2011): 69-89. Natasha Tretheway’s poetry can be read as a sustained work of mourning for her mother who met a tragic death. It seems that Tretheway fails in completing the Freudian “work of mourning” by being unable to withdraw her “attachment to” her mother, “that lost object.” Her poetry reveals every symptom of what Freud called “melancholia” which is quite opposite to normal “mourning.” Paradoxically enough, however, she seems to succeed by failing, for true mourning is to keep the other alive and not to close the border between life and death. Her poetry demonstrates what Derrida eloquently elaborated: “In order to succeed, [mourning] would well have to fail, to fail well. It would well have to fail, for this is what has to be so, in failing well.” (Chonbuk National University)