The Don’t Touch Garden
Born in 1938 and adopted soon after, Kate Foley grew up in London during WWII. The Don’t Touch Garden explores what it is to be adopted, both for the child and the adoptive parents, through a wide range of poetic styles and complex emotions. Sometimes autobiographical and narrative, sometimes oblique, brought together for the first time, these poems trace a search for identity and for the meaning of family which everyone can relate to, whatever kind of family brought them up. This is NOT a misery memoir! Some terrible things happen, but the voice of Kate’s young self, deeply unimpressed by all the drama around her, holds the story together.
Kate Foley
Kate Foley is a widely published, prize-winning poet who has read in many UK and European locations. She was president of the Suffolk Poetry Society until 2022. Her first collection, Soft Engineering was short-listed for best first collection at Aldeburgh. Her working life has ranged from delivering babies to conserving delicate archaeological material, and she also became Head of English Heritage’s scientific and technical research laboratories. Although she has always written poetry it wasn’t until Kate gave up the day job that she began to publish more widely. She now lives with her wife, between Amsterdam and Suffolk, where she performs, writes, edits, leads workshops and whenever possible works with artists in other disciplines.
