Interview with Bruce McEver by Story Preservation Initiative

Bruce McEver has spent the better part of his life building connections between those things about which he is passionate: poetry, literacy, religion, and business. He holds degrees from Georgia Tech, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Divinity School and is the Founder and Chairman of Berkshire Capital, a multi-national financial services advisory firm that pioneered the concept of providing independent mergers, acquisitions, and strategic advisory services to investment managers and securities firms.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Bruce believes that poetry formed the foundation of his business acumen and success. Poetry has the capacity to transform and enrich the lives of both writers and readers of poems.

Bruce’s story, although rich in the prelude, begins for our purposes in 1968, the year he graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Industrial Engineering, a proficiency in mathematics, a reverence for nature, and, thanks to a great teacher, a newly found passion for poetry. In the intervening years, he has gone on to write three chapbooks and is the author of three books of poetry Full Horizon (Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005), Scaring Up the Morning (C&R Press, 2013), and Like Lesser Gods (C&R Press, 2018). In addition, his poems have appeared in many national publications including Ploughshares, Westview, The Berkshire Review, Courtland Review, The Atlanta Review, and others.

C&R Press 2018

Like Lesser Gods

Bruce McEver

In Like Lesser Gods, Bruce McEver explores themes of loss in a way that deals with the mortality of personal relationships, the realization and search for deeper meaning. The poems are traditional and contemporary, but a strong reminder of what’s important in a quickly changing world.

These are fine poems of hard truth. They are mature and thoughtful. They are the poems of a mature man who has lived, loved, and suffered. That is to say they are deeply human poems. We should all be grateful for the grace revealed by these remarkable words.

David Bottoms

American Poet, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

Although quiet, Bruce McEver’ s poems are driven by strong emotion and love of the world, while the events in the poems and descriptions of nature are set out in exact detail. Like Lesser Gods has many moving elegies, loving descriptions of relatives and friends who have died; but the one event that contains them all appears in the poems that describe the death of a marriage, which can be painful to read: the betrayals, falsehoods, infidelities and, in the end, the speaker’s attempt to get beyond the heartbreak to find that a new life must begin with forgiveness. This is a brave book: a book for grownups.

Stephen Dobyns

American poet and novelist

C&R Press 2013

Scaring Up The Morning

Bruce McEver

Bruce McEver writes poems with his head and heart but also with his ear, which is keenly attuned to the soundscape of simple English. In his newest poems, the clear obser vations of a world traveler are delivered with musical balance and a quiet authority.

Billy Collins

American Poet, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

Bruce McEver’s words move us to the silence behind them, as the world itself is merely the image of its larger purpose. His poems impress with the sincerity that comes from immeasurable loss and tender regard.

J. D. McClatchy

American poet and novelist

Jeanne Duval Editions 2005

Full Horizon

Bruce McEver

In the introduction to Full Horizon, Georgia Tech professor Thomas Lux wrote of the book’s author, Bruce McEver, “Wherever he goes, poetry goes with him.”

It can also be said that McEver leaves poetry wherever he’s been––most notably at Tech, where he endowed a visiting chair in writing at the Ivan Allen College’s School of Literature, Communication and Culture.

In 2002, giving back to the school that gave so much to him, Bruce, together with Henry C. Bourne, Jr., established Poetry at Tech, working to ensure that in a highly specialized and technological environment students’ aptitudes in the humanities are nurtured and supported as a foundation for life-long learning.

Believing that access to the broader aspects of liberal arts, including poetry, literature, and travel, will better enable students to understand the context and impact of the specialized education they are gaining.

The Poetry at Tech program has evolved into one of the premier showcases of poetry in the Southeast.

The Poetry of Work

“Engineers aren’t worth a damn if they can’t write,” says Bruce McEver. This is one of the reasons Berkshire Capital Chairman Bruce McEver gives for having endowed a chair in poetry at his alma mater, Georgia Tech. In the following interview on the Paula Gordon Show, Bruce speaks with Thomas Lux, who runs the program.

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