The title of this short essay refers to the fundamental or predominant content and characteristics of the poetry in two paradigmatic books by Tarek William Saab, published in 2025 to commemorate his 45 years as a writer. The first, written between the ages of 22 and 24, is titled THE RIVERS OF WRATH (1987), with which he strikingly debuted as a young, irreverent, and militant poet committed to religiosity, love, and rebellion.
The second is his most recent book, published 40 years later, this July: with the evocative title A TRAIN TRAVELS TO MIDNIGHT SKY (2025), in which he projects himself as a poet universally internalized in his own human sensibility; but, in dialectical correlation with the external world. Thus, immediate and everyday objectivity merges with transcendent, reflective, and universal subjectivity.
Let's look at the evidence of this dialectical relationship, starting from a few small and modest samples from these two poetry collections.
1.- THE RIVERS OF WRATH
This is the first recognized and published book with which Tarek manages to enter and establish himself in the poetic literary field of our country; and on the other hand, it fell to the poet Gustavo Pereira, of the generation of the sixties, to recognize and welcome the arrival of a young writer of poetry who surprises and promises a new, recreative breath of subversive and amorous poetry in our country, as he expresses it by describing him as "a poet of greater accent, gifted both for the solidarity and redemptive anguish that are, as many know, manifestations of the highest love, as well as for tenderness and melancholy, that kind of disquietness or strangeness that Liu Ku Chuan sang of when
"He vainly tried to flee from the harsh world of impiety" (p. 9).
Following this recognition, Tarek's poetry gained considerable acclaim among readers and literary critics. In my personal opinion, THE RIVERS OF WRATH, in its opening pages, which recreate socially engaged poetry, reframes the discussion surrounding poetry and the intellectual's social commitment; however, this occurred within very limited and adverse circumstances. Tarek was a member of a left-wing political organization, the PRV (Venezuelan Revolutionary Party), and a promoter of the newspaper RUPTURA, which was of a political nature.
subversive and anti-electoral. Located in that political space, his poetry was recognized and applauded by the intellectuals, political groups and popular, patriotic and revolutionary sectors.
From his first to his latest collection of poems, Tarek's poetic practice has reached advanced levels in the reception of all his published works, in the appreciation of his style, and in the selection of themes so numerous and extraordinary for their thematic coherence: the imagery, the external references, and the sustained and refined creativity that have made him an innovative poet of his own writing. This is a bold gamble and a risk-taking of his own potential for poetic creativity, which certifies him as the most important poet of his generation in Venezuela and one of the most
prominent figures in Latin America. Therein lies a very accurate assessment, since the semantic and aesthetic quality, supported by his very personal content and style, accredit him as a unique poet, recognized both within and outside our country.
Almost 40 years after the first edition of Los Ríos… , we now have in our hands a very well-prepared second edition, with which we have established a new reading of its themes, from three fundamental perspectives: the beautiful, the human, and the universal, to identify the function, value, effects, and transcendence of these three dimensions with the purpose of reinterpreting and renewing our dialogue with poetry, beyond or within the
relentless and unstoppable force of time.
The title, The Rivers of Wrath, juxtaposes two realities: natural water and hatred among humans, linked by the preposition "of," which indicates ownership or belonging. Rivers represent natural water, flowing from the mountains to spill through the lower, flatter channels. They are the natural referent of dialectics, coined by Heraclitus: "The water of a river is never the same," for it flows from the heights, travels its course, and finally reaches the different shores of the sea, a predetermined destination that can be
another river, the sea or simply deep lands, as a result of the confrontation of opposites from which new realities emerge.
It is important to highlight the river's quality as a representative phenomenon of dialectics, which beautifully illustrates the correlation between the unfolding of nature, which also operates and is reproduced in the human species. Thus, the poem's title is, in itself, a universal value that synchronizes the dialectical relationship between Good (the waters of the rivers) and Evil through Wrath (rage, hatred, revenge, struggles, demands, confrontations).
2. A TRAIN TRAVELS TO THE MIDNIGHT SKY
To begin with, let's say that the book's title has the structure of a grammatical sentence: the subject is "A Train"; and the predicate is "travels to the midnight sky"; but its semantic value corresponds to the structure of a strictly literary category, namely metaphor, which in this case is centered on the correlation or unification of three distinct images: the material image of the train, the abstract and sacred image of the journey to heaven, and the temporal image of midnight. All three converge to give the poem its implicit polysemous meaning. The train represents the concrete and objectified image as an observable truth, as a material object useful for land transportation and a symbol of the beginning of technological modernity. The journey, as a substantive image of the
mobility, displacement, and the human capacity to travel through different
Spaces for recognizing and enjoying the earthly world. Heaven is the cosmic, religious, and sacred image; and midnight, as a temporal, enigmatic, cosmic image, is also consecrated for rest and the recovery of the body's strength in the darkness of sleep. Therein lies the construction of a poetic statement that is nothing other than the central imaginary core of literary discourse.
Likewise, the image of the Midnight Sky is like an allusion or an invocation of the sacred, since it is the time for sleep, for invoking God and receiving the energies that, being contrary and antagonistic, the poet unifies. In the construction of a new image, which is precisely that of the midnight sky, to close the day already lived and open the new day to continue living alone or in union with the loved one, seen and interpreted in this way, the title of the book is the first metaphor with which we begin our poetic dialogue with the text that its author, the poet Tarek William Saab, invites us to read. In that sense, the first poem that begins the text is the
next:
I see in the courtyard of the deserted houses / The naked veil of a widow / Weeping /
On the portal / Of all the wars….
From our reading, we appreciate a short poem of five free verses.
Each one of them shows us a refined, clean image, without clutter.
discursive; but, focused on its own semantic value, whether individual, real,
abstract or concrete, imaginary, intimate, fleeting, local or full of beauty, of
humanity and universality. In that sense, the first verse is an image of solitude, the
isolation, abandonment, in those courtyards of deserted houses, towards which the
The poet's gaze stops and he reacts as if searching for the reasons, the causes and
the consequences.
The second verse shows the image of a widowed woman, surrounded and immersed in solitude like a naked veil, whose metaphorical meaning places us in the self-absorption of affective pain, real and concrete in the interiority of her religious beauty inherent in her body and her human and universal rationality.
The third verse is simply the image and function of weeping as an expression of human pain; of the soul that has lost its companion and begins to suffer from loneliness and helplessness, alongside human beauty.
that continues to shelter her.
The fourth verse shows, precisely, the painful, human, and universal image of the widow weeping at the doorway of the house that separates her from all wars; and the fifth and final verse shows precisely the doorway of all wars as the most perverse and painful image of humanity…
With this first essay, very brief and precise, on the new poetic writing of Tarek William Saab, we have managed to identify the first important and significant differences between his first book, THE RIVERS OF WRATH, and his most recent book, published under the title A TRAIN TRAVELS TO THE MIDNIGHT SKY, which contain distinct thematic, semantic, and stylistic approaches: but it is worth mentioning, he already hinted at this in The Rivers
From Ira with the themes of melancholy, eroticism and introspection: today based on the new contributions that the poet himself has been discovering and testing towards new horizons of the beautiful, the human and the universal of his poetic creation published in this 2025 - where he celebrated his 45 years of Literary Life - in Italy, Russia, Egypt, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador and Cuba, an exceptional case in Venezuelan Literature.
