Gabriela Pachia’s A Shackled Prisonniere, the author’s first volume of her own poetry, is an impressive and deeply felt examination of the self, the soul and the wider world. Using powerful emotions, and pushing the boundaries of language, Gabriela Pachia provides a complex, intense and brutally honest exposé of herself.

Throughout the volume, the author clearly signals her view of herself as inextricably linked with nature and the earth itself. In ‘Self Portrait’ she makes this plain in the opening lines:

I am the last versatile birch
with smooth white bark
in the park overrun by shrubs.

This is further expanded in ‘The Padlocks of Immortality’ where each teardrop not only represents those close to her, but contains geographical features, ‘hill and valleys’.  However, this is not a random part of the earth.  Gabriela Pachia’s vision of herself and her family is specific to her home country.  This is Romanian earth:

yielding red-yellow-blue rhymes
and Carpathian Dracos…

‘Hang-Gliding’ demonstrates a tie with the country at the very deepest levels,