Brad Leithauser has been publishing poems and novels, much of it brilliant work, for forty years. When he was a young man he imagined writing a book about the structure of poetry. It has recently appeared—has been haunting his imagination for decades, and now at last is available between two covers. Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry is a lifetime’s worth of education on the craft, a handbook, a book of essays, yes, but each one geared—in the manner, say, of John Hollander—to particular elements. There are chapters on “Stanzas,” “Enjambment,” “Rhyme and Rhyme Decay,” “Iambic Tetrameter,” even a chapter on the boon afforded English-language poets by English’s odd spellings, and another on “Rim Rhyme” (“where consonants are held steady while internal vowels are shifted around,” like “light” and “late”). Though the title phrase means “rhyme” as a kind of synonym for poetry in general, this poet does argue for the power of rhyming—the relationship between two words—as being, still, central and generative to the art form’s vitality.