Slow reader by Vicki Feaver

At the start of the poem, the poet uses a list to show the boy’s wide range of skills. This is show in the quote ‘’make sculptures fabulous machines invent games’’. By using the dynamic verbs make and invent we can see that the poet clearly believes in the child impressive physical capability. Moreover the word ‘’fabulous’’ highlights the fact that the reader thinks that whatever the child has made and put together is worthy of praise. This shows that the speaker is very proud of the boy. In the first stanza alliteration is used to emphasise key points: sighing and shaking his head like an old man, it encourage the readers to think of shivering, as if the boy gets confronted with reading, he shivers with fear. When she describes him sitting on her lap with his book, she compares him to an old man who is being asked to cross a mountain range that's impossible for anybody to get across. It seems to her that that's how he feels about being asked to read. She doesn't say that he's lazy or stupid. She just compares him to an old man - presumably someone with lots of wisdom and experience - who is being asked to do something he knows, is impossible.
The speaker is obviously someone who has a close relationship with the child. We can tell that from line 6, "When I take him on my knee." The speaker is probably the child's mother/ father/guardian. It's certainly somebody who loves him and spends a lot of time with him and pays a lot of attention to him. The tone of piece does fluctuate, at the beginning it starts with a positive but changes to a negative tone, but the negativity is a sign of worry and concern.

In the first four lines, before she says anything about what he can't do, she praises him for lots of things he can do. She says that as she tries to get him to read the words in the book, he responds to them the way a picky eater responds to food he doesn't want. She says that when she lets him down off her lap, he's "a fish returning/to its element."