[1][4] In 1966, in the new year, he left his wife Jean for Judith Black, a post-graduate student he had met in Sydney, who moved to Dunedin with her daughter.
[3]: 23 Lonie's first two volumes of poetry were published during this time: Recreations (Wai-te-ata Press, 1967) and Letters from Ephesus (The Bibliography Room, University of Otago, 1970).
[9] A review in The Press described his poetry on the subject of death as "genuine and moving" and displaying "considerable virtuosity", although noted that the title poem in particular seemed to owe a debt to Allen Curnow.
It highlights the classicism in his poetry through retold legends and mythological references; "Firmly located within particular places, and enriched by traditional cultural echoes, his poetry reveals a strong lyric voice and intense feeling, always tempered by controlled handling of verse forms and by very discriminating choice of language.
[22][23][24] In 2015, the Otago University Press published A Place to Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie, edited by David Howard.
[3] Vincent O'Sullivan, then the New Zealand Poet Laureate, commented: "We cannot overestimate just how much we owe to David Howard for his superb edition of Iain Lonie's complete poems.
And in a remarkable fidelity to the tides of his productive but troubled life, he wrote a body of poems on love and grief and the searing currents of remembrance that, in New Zealand writing, stands alone.
"[3][25] In the introduction, scholar Damian Love wrote that Lonie's five volumes of poetry "spanned a period, from 1967 to 1991, that was not receptive to his voice ... [Lonie] wrote with the precision and passionate restraint of a classical style at a time when avant-garde enthusiasms favoured disjunction, demotic speech and aggressive experiment.
In the final paragraph, Love stated that "very few New Zealanders, perhaps none besides Baxter, have written so many good poems possessed of an urgent inner necessity".
Professor Lawrence Jones, writing in Landfall Review Online, commented on the long delay between Lonie's death and the publication of these collected works, and said: "The reader can only be grateful that such poetry has been made available to us".
[26] 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of 2015: "In a brilliant act of literary resuscitation, Howard has brought together more than 200 poems, published and unpublished by Lonie, revealing him as important and unjustly neglected.
In the anthology's introduction, Newton commented that "as other readers have concluded before me, [Lonie] is among the best of his generation", and said A Place to Go On From "easily passes the informal test of historical work that still feels like news in 2015.