
Work Songs
Poems to Celebrate Work
by Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald is the author of many books of poetry, non-fiction and children' literature. He has studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Earlham College and the Iowas Writers' Workshop. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, received an Ackerman Nicholson Fellowship and Garrabrandt Poetry Medallion.
He has worked on projects for the Association for Bahá'í Studies, the center for Science in the Public Interest, Defenders of Wildlife, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Federation for the Blind, National Public Radio, the Smithsonian Institution, the US Public Interest Research Group and others.
Praise for Michael Fitzgerald's Poetry
"I love Michael Fitzgerald's poems. They are lucid, original, powerful and deeply human."
Thomas Lux, Sarah Lawrence College
"To read Fitzgerald is to discover one's own humanity."
Roger White, Haifa, Israel
"It is a pleasure to find so many well-crafted lyrics under one cover."
Pete Hulme, United Kingdom Bahá'í Journal
"& something genuine in every poem."
Alice Quinn, Poetry Editor, The New Yorker
Table of Contents Cover Art by John Burns
ISBN: 1-896331-63-7 or 9781896331638 | WMPub# 1139 | 6" x 9"
80 page perfect bound book | $11.95 CDN
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Table of Contents
7 Song for the Workers
8 Ballot
9 The New World Guitar
10 We, the Determined
10 A Poem for the Disabled
11 Windows on Worship
12 Bookseller with Coffeehouse
13 On Light
14 Men's Song
15 There is a Seat at the Table
16 World Religion and the World Bank
17 Diner Days
18 The Working Vacation
19 The Uses of Art
20 Lament for Specialists
21 An Evening Performance
22 To Play With Feeling
23 Rock Musician with a Ph.D.
24 Handworks Gallery Vignette
25 A Surmise of Elegance
26 The Roots of Jazz
27 Jazz Song
28 Concert Night
29 World Music Medley
30 Canaveral Couplets
31 Spading the Earth
32 Cover Crops
33 Each Note, A Pearl
34 Jazzman
35 The Environmentalist
36 The Developer's Dream
37 Cabbies, Singers and Senators
38 Those Hands, That Face
39 On Architecture: Notes on a Virginia Town
40 Facing the Lions
41 Two Black Scholars
42 Homage Due, Homage Paid
43 Kind of Blue
44 Apocalypse Dream
45 Real People, Real Town
46 After Work
47 A Calling
48 This Grace, This Leverage
49 To Dance
50 The Mind of God
51 Renaissance Man
53 Masonry
54 Road-Time
55 Road-Rage and the Well-Mannered Executive
56 Rock'n' Roll Diva
57 The Luck of Flight
58 Loading Dock Blues
59 Buddhist Economics
60 Writer
60 Notice
61 For Love of Writing
62 Work Still To Do
68 A Window on Possibility
69 Editors and Fishermen
70 Our Low-Fat Library
71 Three Generals
72 The Community of Scholars
73 This I Believe
74 Wood-Grain
75 The Tao of Music
76 An Ode to Music
77 Work Poem
78 Work as Worship
79 God, the Potter