His scores range from Western orchestral, choral, vocal, chamber, theatre and contemporary dance genres, to intercultural conceptions featuring Ghanean Drummer, Javanese Gamelan, or Korean traditional performers.
Demonstrating the composer's early assuredness with the English Choral Tradition (enriched by his study of medieval music and the ethos of Benjamin Britten at the University of East Anglia), it led to requests for similar works.
However Poole had, by then, undertaken studies with Alexander Goehr and Jonathan Harvey whose modernist influences were handled with increasing assuredness in the instrumental works of the 1970s, notably the Clements Prize-winning piano trio Algol Of Perseus (1973).
Around 1990, at the age of 40, a process of simplification and regeneration was complete and the ensuing decade was soon to prove a productive and influential one starting powerfully with the African vitality and hypnotic shimmering of String Quartet No.2 (commissioned by The Lindsays) and the glorious sea voyage score for the RNCM wind band, Sailing With Archangels.
Poole rejects the inference of 'eclecticism' if this means aping ready-made formuli: he sees the disjunctions as crucial - a set of koans, inviting the listener to sense subtler causes beneath the illusion of surfaces.
Developed in order to manage textural control of an image of the departed soul travelling past galaxies at the climax of Blackbird, Stellation has subtly joined African and Asian musical experiences among the compositional vocabularies available to Poole's later work.
Poole's Janus-faced preface is revealing: "Whereas John Cage famously used the I Ching for its random coin-tossing techniques to produce a very iconoclastic music, very 1950s, I sense a contemporary need for the renewal of endangered cultural traditions (Taoist and pianistic), moving forward by taking nourishment from the past.
His compositions from 2007 to 2010 were sporadic and taut: miniatures such as the Yeats settings After Long Silence, a beguiling duo for traditional Korean players Diary of a Cherry, and a controversial contribution to the NMC Songbook Heynonnynonny Smallprint.
However, retirement in 2009 from the position of Professor at Bristol University has opened the way for new activity, as producer of a CD of Wiseman's finely composed, intense yet reticent music (Birdsongs In Silence), and the revival of earlier skills as pianist.
Writing music to film, and commitment to concert activity (for example as duo partner to violinist Madeleine Mitchell and conductor of a Gloucestershire choir) may be among the factors bringing conciseness and simplicity to many of his more recent compositions.