[9] In 1999 Howard retired from his role as a SFX technician to live and write in Pūrākaunui, a small settlement north of Dunedin.

At Pūrākaunui he lived in a purpose-built shed; his house "overlooks farmland and the blue screen of the South Pacific, onto which I can project my fantasies.

James Norcliffe wrote in The Star, "[Howard's] voice is his own and unmistakable, and his love poems with their often surrealistic edge have a quality rare in New Zealand poetry.

"[11] Eggleton weighed in again on Howard's third book, Holding Company (1995), with a review for Landfall, New Zealand's foremost and longest running literary journal.

[14] "What is extraordinary about this writing," wrote Terry Locke, "is the number of tensions it sustains without quite resolving, between the foreign (defamiliarised) and familiar, the present and the remembered, the soft and the hard, the fleeting and the permanent."

The title poem is a dramatic monologue in two parts, written from the perspective of an Irish Catholic tenant farmer who emigrates to Otago in 1874.

New Zealand poet Michael Harlow praised Howard for writing "poems that are very much animated by a thoughtful music: those moments of quick surprise that so often are stunning in their overall effect."

David Eggleton called the volume "a revisionist take on Howard's earlier big book, Shebang: Collected Poems 1980–2000....

"At times," Eggleton continues, Howard is "a kind of fossicking archaeologist, one who excavates telling language from Victorian journals and Scottish folk ballads, as well as superannuated rock songs.

The 2013–2015 New Zealand Poet Laureate, Vincent O'Sullivan, declared the volume a "superb edition of Iain Lonie's poems.

"[16] Auckland author Peter Simpson named the volume as one of the best books of 2015: "In a brilliant act of literary resuscitation, Howard has brought together more than 200 poems, published and unpublished by Lonie, revealing him as important and unjustly neglected.