Beginnings and Beyond — Carol Lynn Pearson

"Poetry won't sell," said local publishers when Carol Lynn Pearson and her husband, Gerald, presented them with the manuscript for Beginnings in 1968. So they published two thousand copies themselves, believing that they had their lifetime supply of wedding presents.

Nearly four decades and 300,000 volumes later, Carol Lynn's poetry has been internationally acclaimed, reprinted by Ann Landers's newspaper column, A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and college literary textbooks such as Houghton Mifflin's Structure and Meaning: An Introduction to Literature.

But more important, her poems have carved themselves into the hearts of her loyal following, giving inspiration, smiles, tears, and always the exact thought needed for a particular talk, lesson, letter, or personal need. Familiar life situations become vividly meaningful through Carol Lynn's magic of insight and imagery --

• One splendid, never-worn red dress in the otherwise drab wardrobe symbolizes a mother's deathbed regret at her self-abnegating life and her offspring's resultant selfishness .

• An elderly farmer smugly contemplates the inherited land he has dramatically improved and then goes proudly home to the wife whose potential he has consistently stifled.

• A woman experiencing her second wedding, now "an orchard in September, not a branch in May," says "I do" and knows "I can."

Beginnings & Beyond offers Carol Lynn's most popular poems to still another generation to enjoy and treasure.