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Is apology a means of regular, sublimated confession in a secular society? Poet Helen Mort explores the complexities and subtexts of apology, drawing on both her own lifelong tendency to over-apologise and on remarkable poetic apologies.

Do we sometimes say ‘sorry’ for something inappropriate and specific when we actually feel a more general sense of sorrow and guilt, she asks? Helen looks at Caroline Bird's expression of this in the poem A Toddler Creates Thunder by Dancing on a Manhole, where the presence of apology is all the more powerful because it is a spectral apology, remaining unuttered.

And Helen suggests that apology does not always need a target. "Sometimes, I just want to apologise for the world and my place in it," she says.

Producer Zita Adamson
An Overtone Production for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 3