Zinnes disagreed, arguing that his love poems have "a kind of contemporary lyricism, that is, a lyricism that avoids excess but yet exudes tenderness and desire even as it questions their endurance, even their power." In 2003 Howard collaborated with the New Zealand photographer Fiona Pardington to create "How To Occupy Ourselves," consisting of eighteen poems and seventeen photographs. "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." He declared it "a difficult book to review," because "it simply doesn't allow one to feel that one has settled into a confirmed reading." Howard's next collection of new poems, "The Word Went Round", appeared in 2006. 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. The volume included images of six paintings by New Zealand artist Gary Currin, created in response to the title poem. In 2011, Howard published a second volume of collected works, "The Incomplete Poems". 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"... Dates of composition for each poem have now been added, revealing that some of the poems in "Shebang" were written before 1980." "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. At other times, he's the laconic narrator forced to fall back on an embarrassment of unreliable words." Howard's edition "A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie" appeared in 2015. Howard compiled and edited the works of the late Cambridge scholar and Dunedin poet, Iain Lonie (1932–1988). The 2013–2015 New Zealand Poet Laureate, Vincent O'Sullivan, declared the volume a "superb edition of Iain Lonie's poems." 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."