Four slim volumes of verse were published in her lifetime – Shaela, A Nev Foo a Coarn (subsequently combined as Doobled-Up), Linkstanes and Snyivveries Rhoda was a frequent contributor to the local Radio Shetland, reading her poems, and forming a double act known as "Tamar and Beenie" with local broadcaster and freelance journalist Mary Blance.
Her poems reflect an intense love of the local scene, the land and the sea, the flowers, the birds, the animals, and the crofting communities she knew when young.
Her mother, born Barbara Huano Thomason, was from Da Horn, Lower Skelberry, Lunnasting … As she gave herself to the demands of motherhood her other creative skills lay quiescent, disturbed now and again by a bairn's rhyme, reflecting the fun and the excitement of their family life.
Rhoda's first published writing was in the pages of The New Shetlander – the poem 'Fladdabister' – embodying as it does the familiar combination of an evocative description with her gift of placing what she had seen in a historical and social context.
Her radio and TV work, based on scripts provided by herself, enriched us all …The voar number of The New Shetlander in 1970 contained a dialect poem entitled 'Fladdabister'.
Readers accustomed to a diet of Shetland verse might well have braced themselves for the usual dose of nostalgia laced with the obligatory taekit ruifs, trowie burns and simmer dims.
This new combined volume is designed to meet the continuing demand for her poetry as well as to present in a more permanent form her writings to date ... Rhoda Bulter is passionately attached to Shetland, its people and their native tongue, its landscapes and natural life.
She spent two childhood years in the remote rural peninsula of Lunnasting, and that period of close contact with the old traditional way of life left a vivid imprint on her imagination.