Thank you for your donation of two and sixpence ... I am delighted to tell you we have for you a dear little catholic baby girl ... if you like baby you may take her away ... no need to bring any clothes, baby will have a small bundle...
So wrote the Adoption Society to the woman who became Kate Foley’s adoptive mother. Sixty years later she was standing with her newly discovered brother by the bronze plaque commemorating their mother in a San Francisco graveyard. But this is not just the well worn story of abandonment and discovery, although the poems hinge around those facts. While these poems will resonate strongly with those of us adopted as children, and with adoptive parents; all of us grow up wondering who we are and who we might be, and need to see, accept and parent the face we find in the mirror.
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.