look of follies gone before”; in “Amazonas.com,” where the natives dress up (or down) as headhunters for the tourists; in “Hitting the Silk,” which comments on severance packages given to big executives; in “Where Is Gutzon Borglum Now That We Need Him?” which proposes rebuilding New Hampshire’s fallen Great Stone Face as a generic Yankee, Jackie Kennedy, or favorite rock star; in “Edith and Woody and Nancy and Ronnie,” about loyal widows of great men who jealously guard the reputations of their husbands; and “Guidelines for a Cover Illustration,” which defines the old-fashioned hero-adventurer before the age of political correctness.

A number of poems look back nostalgically on a bygone era, but with similarly comic effect. Such is “The Last Newsboy,” which destroys the myth of the newsboy as role model but still laments his passing “As now newspapers are. As AP, UP ebb,/ Ex-buyer on my corner, see you on the Web.” In “The Last Elevator Operator, or, Mr. Otis Regrets,” the lament is for the spiffily dressed figure who put “a human face on ups/ And downs, the accidental stops.” In “The Last Cigarette Girl,” the skimpily dressed but unsuccessful entrepreneur considers selling drugs but decides she will have to settle for hitting the “talk show circuit” as a “Transgendered dwarf.” Then there is the “duenna” in “The Last Chaperon” who not only “could have held down AIDS, and overpopulation” but also could have arranged many a marriage on favorable terms. These sad characters from a bygone time symbolize the extent to which the sleazy contemporary world has fallen.

Other poems look all the way back to classical or biblical times, but with a contemporary application. While Adam and Eve’s perversity has already been noted above, “The Devil and Daedalus” depicts Daedalus and Icarus as their classical counterparts. “Inventing the Subdivision” reinterprets the landing of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat as a developer’s dream, though fighting among the animals aboard might have caused a few extinctions. “Fishers of Men” ends on a grace note to the hookers in Mexico’s Atlantic resorts. “Administrating” presents Pontius Pilate as a typical harried executive, “The Passion of 1934” describes the Oberammergau Passion play as produced and acted by the Nazis, and “Afterward” examines the disbelief after Jesus left the tomb.

Cassity draws on his travels in a few poems, which are at least reassuring that folly exists all over the world. However, in Europe the follies have been somewhat more somber, taking the form of a violent history of regime changes: “Free Trade in Mitteleuropa” comments ironically on the changing fortunes and names of Trieste; “Models” describes St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg as resembling many U.S. state capital buildings, but one where democracy has taken a beating; and “Update for Francis Joseph” describes restorations of ruins in Vienna and Budapest as resembling a Japanese movie set for Godzilla, though “Centuries/ Of occupation by the Ottomans/ Have left at least a Turkish bath, intact/ And functioning, a crescent on its dome./ Or is it sickle without hammer, Marx/ As emblem put to rout? Crusades and creeds/ Come each apart. The Double Eagle split.” In “Self-Guided Tour, 1987,” Cassity finds “diversity” as lacking in South Africa as back home, “Though we do not admit it.”

Cassity saves some of his unkindest cuts for the arts. In the collection’s opening poem, “Fantasia on Dummy Keys,” about a practice keyboard without sound, Cassity opines that “Lacking sound,/ It will forgive wrong notes, not know an exercise/ From Bach, if there indeed is some distinction. Mute,/ It is the ideal medium for twelve-tone works,/ If not the Chopin repertoire.” In “Erich Wolfgang Korngold,” Cassity favors the famous composer for the movies who, as a Jew escaping the Nazis, fled his native Vienna for Hollywood (where his classical critics accused him of selling out), but in “Dance” he slams the famous dancer and choreographer Martha Graham: “A dance is footwork or is nothing, as the tango knows,/ And hoofing. Get real, Martha. Ancient Greeks in brilliantine/ Or Appalachians in taps each mock the origin.” While Cassity speaks up for an underappreciated instrument in “A Course in Sax Education,” he also proposes, in “Report of the Monuments Commission,” a monument to slavery on the Washington Mall.

Cassity could be accused of being outrageous just to get attention, much like the media whose influence he consistently shows (in “Soldiers Three in the Big Easy,” he admits to channel surfing). Otherwise, it is hard to say what he really believes. Perhaps what he personally believes does not matter so much as the point he makes with his outrageousness: In a free country, there should be no limits on belief, thought, or speech. He does not seem to have a political agenda, since his wit cuts several ways: It implies opposition to religious fundamentalism as much as it does to political correctness, both of which are forms of mind control.

Cassity comes closest to stating his point in the poem that gives the collection its title, “Robinson Crusoe to Capt. Dreyfus.” Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was the French military officer of Jewish descent who was wrongly accused of treason, tried and convicted, and imprisoned on French Guiana’s infamous Devil’s Island. In Cassity’s poem, Robinson Crusoe tells Dreyfus: “All islands are the Devil’s in a sense:/ The forcing ground of idleness, their threat/ Of limits, of the inescapable.” Islands seem to symbolize not only physical confines, prisons, but also limitations of thought, prisons of the mind. Victims of shipwreck and anti-Semitism are equally circumscribed by the Devil.

With heroes like Korngold, Crusoe, and Dreyfus, it is not surprising that Cassity sounds like a voice in the wilderness. Still, it is a voice worth listening tofor its skepticism, scorn of fashion and hypocrisy, and humor.