A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter C

caoránach

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An Irish adjective or noun describing boggy, peaty terrain, used in poetry to evoke the distinctive landscape of Irish moorland with its associations of wildness, bleakness, and the slow organic memory of wet earth.

Detailed Definition
Caoránach describes the particular quality of bog-like terrain — heathery, peaty, waterlogged — and its use in verse grounds the poem in a precisely Irish landscape texture. Unlike the more general móin, caoránach carries the specific sensory quality of this terrain: its softness underfoot, its dark colour, its distinctive smell of peat and heather. Poets seeking to render the west of Ireland landscape in verse found caoránach useful for capturing something that English landscape vocabulary could not quite match — the particular Irish experience of a terrain shaped by rain, peat, and geological time. The word belongs to the vocabulary of immersive landscape poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
The caoránach is associated with rowan trees believed to ward off evil; Poets invoke the caoránach for protection against fairy enchantments; The red berries of the caoránach symbolize blood and vitality in verse; Druids use branches of the caoránach in rituals of cleansing; The caoránach appears in folklore as a tree planted near doorways for safety; Modern ecological poetry reclaims the caoránach as part of native Irish heritage.
Additional Notes
Caoránach describes the boggy, peaty landscape typical of much of Ireland, evoking a sense of dampness, darkness, and ancient preservation. In poetry, it is used to create atmosphere, suggesting a landscape that is difficult to traverse and rich in hidden history. The caoránach terrain is often associated with mystery and the supernatural, as bogs were places where bodies and artifacts were preserved for centuries. Poets use this term to ground their work in the specific physical reality of the Irish environment.
Also Known As
boggy peaty marshy moorland
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