 His earliest books of verse, "Sarah Bernhardt's Leg" (1983) and "Saving the Young Men of Vienna" (1987, winner of the Brittingham Prize), showed the distinctive mixture of lyricism and wit that can be found in his later work, which began in "Big-Leg Music" (1995).In that collection, Kirby began presenting what he termed "memory poems," freewheeling, associative verse with long lines in shaped stanzas that give play to his interests in high and popular culture, are informed by personal and cultural experiences in the author's life, and present, under the guise of apparent ingenuousness, an array of literary and cultural theories wittily and succinctly stated—all making what the poet and critic Peter Klappert has termed "the Kirby poem.