Episode 5

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 BBC Radio 3