In METAMORPHOSIS: From Mental Illness to Spiritual Awakening, a wide-ranging collection of poems, author John Frederick Zurn focuses on the challenges he has faced with specific bipolar disorder symptoms and how these have had an effect on his life and relationships. The book is split into three sections. The first, entitled Purgatory, contains poems which reflect on his mental health issues and his struggle to find direction and purpose. The second recounts the poet’s spiritual awakening. There are more than 250 poems in these first two sections and a smaller sample in the final part, entitled Society, which collects more observational works.
As suggested by the book’s title, taken as a whole these poems reflect Zurn’s transformative journey through his mental illness. The author explains how he sees each section as overlapping with the others in the manner of a Venn diagram. When he was ill he found a need to form a closer bond with God to the extent that the desire for the divine became enmeshed within the illness itself. Inner struggles freed Zurn from delusion until his spirituality emerged with greater clarity. Zurn cites the act of writing as being crucial to surviving his illness. Though always acknowledging the assistance he received from mental health professionals, Zurn recalls that the simple tools of a pencil and paper were instrumental in him being able to transform his state of mind whether he was in hospital, halfway house or some other institution.
Each of the poems in METAMORPHOSIS comprises eight lines. They are uniform in structure and almost all conform to the same rhyme scheme. Though superficially similar, the three hundred or so poems in the collection cover a vast range of emotions with honesty, insight and no little lyrical prowess. As would perhaps be expected, Zurn is excellent when writing explicitly about his personal troubles with works that are brave and sometimes challenging. His more explicitly religious poems are full of moments of wider revelation and wonder. Close examinations of nature reveals epiphanies, as exampled in the closing lines of the poem ‘I Longed To See The Forest’: ‘When everything is God/ A raindrop is the ocean’. The healing potential of creativity is evidenced throughout.
Balancing harsh realities with more lyrical reflections, John Frederick Zurn’s METAMORPHOSIS: From Mental Illness to Spiritual Awakening provides an insight into the author’s psyche and reveals the illuminative visions his writing and contemplations have provided.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader