Friends, pupils and ex-colleagues of Geoffrey Poole (I write as all three) find it difficult to believe that this year witnesses his sixtieth birthday. In the past 40 years, he has consolidated his aesthetic position and career as a British composer of multifarious interests and distinctive personality. This article is a testament to his compositional integrity, staying power, humanity and humility. It is necessarily provisional, because each new work by Poole is a fresh beginning, expanding further outwards but also going deeper within, contributing to Western art music's capacity for regeneration and self-adaptation.